VIDEO: Food Locker Honors Late Assistant Principal

Gales Ferry School special education teacher Melissa Miner is coordinator of the Jaret Kulmann Memorial Food Locker, which was created by former principal Mary Porter-Price in honor of the late Jaret Kulmann, an assistant principal at the school who died in 2010. He was 42.

The food locker, located in the Juliet W. Long School end of the campus, is stocked by donations from parents and teachers in the school community. In its first year it has already helped a number of local families in need.

But as Miner explained, it does more than that.

“I loved the idea because I thought it was a great way to support some of the more functional academic needs of my students in the special needs program,” she said. “They do a lot of math through the program, a lot of sorting, a lot of organizing. We create word problems, counting, multiplication, however we want to relate it to match their needs.”  

With the food locker, she said, “they’re getting an experience where they’re able to apply their math to a more functional application, and also at the same time supporting the local school community.”

Throughout the year the school asks for donations and periodically holds a food drive. In addition to local families in need, the food locker also provides nourishment for a number of students at the school.

“We found there was an area of need with certain children who were coming in without snacks, but who didn’t necessarily want to go to the school nurse with that issue. So a lot of teachers were buying snacks for the kids,” Miner said.

“When we found out there was that pocket of need, we decided we were going to collect healthy snacks and then supply them to the classrooms so they would be made available to the children who needed them.”