SCS, YMCA to announce summer meal plan
For now, the YMCA is continuing the school lunch programming it took over for Shelby County Schools when schools closed in March.
The YMCA and SCS will share details of a new summer plan soon, according to district leaders and Brian Mclaughlin, chief operating officer of YMCA of Memphis and The Mid-south.
Typically, the district begins its Summer Food Service Program when school dismisses for the summer. That program is administered at the state level under an agreement with the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
In the meantime, the Shelby County Schools board voted Tuesday to donate nearly $200,000 worth of food set to expire by July 31, 2020, ahead of the 202021 school year. The food will go to the Mid-south Food Bank.
“Expired food will be discarded as waste if not donated” to the food bank, one briefing document explained.
Additional board documents about the donation said that because of COVID-19 closures, nutrition services has not been able to use food from schools and from the central office.
“Nutrition Services is providing the donations to the Mid-south Food Bank in an effort to assist in providing food items to students and families in need,” the document continued.
After the vote, board member Kevin Woods said that the agenda item was presented as a way to donate food that could benefit families immediately. He said it was not conveyed that the donation would have any impact of food supplies available for the summer.
When SCS closed in March due to COVID-19, it established a school meals program based off of its summer meals program, which is usually located in 400 sites across the county, district officials said at the time.
A week after the program was announced, an employee who worked in the nutrition services center tested positive for COVID-19. Although the employee didn’t work directly with food, the district said, it chose to suspend its food program out of an “abundance of caution.”
Over that weekend, the district announced that the YMCA would take over the program, distributing meals at the 60 pre-established sites across the county.
The YMCA continued the meal distribution throughout the remainder of the school year, with assistance from Chartwells, the dining services partner for the University of Memphis, according to a release from the university.
An update the City of Memphis shared on April 24 showed that at that point, one month in to the YMCA’S meal distributions, 317,000 meals had been distributed to students across the county.
At the start of the program, YMCA was averaging about 3,000 meals per day. A week into April, the program had its first day of 9,000 meals. Through April 21, the last date for which data is available, YMCA began to distribute 10,000 student meals per day.