Food program expands to provide for Talawanda elementary students

BY MARIEL PADILLA | Miami University Journalism Student

With elementary students in the Talawanda school district back for another academic year, the local BackPack Program is preparing to distribute more non-perishable, easy-to-prepare food than ever before in the program's 10-year history.

The BackPack Program is run by volunteers and sustained by donations. Each Friday, qualifying students at the three elementary schools in the district discreetly receive and take home food in their backpacks. Each student in the program typically receives a bag that contains canned fruit, vegetable, pasta, protein, cereal bars and snacks to stave off their hunger over the weekend.

Teachers and school administrators observe students and refer those who exhibit specific behaviors such as hoarding food to take home, regularly asking for food or lingering around for seconds. Students are immediately put on the list. No financial records are required.

“We send home a letter with our first BackPack meal bags that notifies parents that their child will receive a meal bag every Friday unless the parent signs that they do not want their child to receive the bags,” program co-coordinator Sarah Smith said. “This way the parent has to do nothing -- no signing or form filling. It gives the child the best advantage of remaining in the program.”

The program is part of Shared Harvest Foodbank’s bigger initiative to address childhood hunger in southwest Ohio. In this area alone, there are thousands of school children who go without enough food every weekend. The BackPack Program is currently provided in 23 of the 48 school districts in the five-county area that includes Butler, Warren, Preble, Darke and Miami counties.

Out of the five counties, Butler County distributes the most bags of food by far. According to the program’s official distribution document, 54,927 bags of food were distributed last school year. This is more than the number of bags distributed in the four other counties combined.

Within Butler County, the Talawanda school district distributed nearly 7,000 bags within one year to the three local elementary schools, Kramer, Bogan and Marshall. The numbers have continuously increased year to year.

Smith attributes the increase to the growth of donations from St. Mary parishioners and the assistance of community liaisons and school counselors in identifying needy students.

“I do not think the numbers of hungry children have been increasing,” Smith said. “I think that it has just taken several years to identify the 200 children that are part of the program.”

The parishioners at Oxford’s St. Mary’s Catholic Church are the main volunteers and benefactors of the BackPack Program. They raised more than $9,000 last year to support approximately 200 students since each student costs $45.

The Shared Harvest delivery truck comes to the church every third Tuesday of the month. Volunteer parishioners move 190 to 230 boxes of food from the truck to storage. Other volunteers distribute the bags to the children at the schools on Friday afternoons.

“We’re thankful we have the number of volunteers we have,” program coordinator Jeanne Glaser said. “But we are continually searching for new ones as some of our regulars get older.”

In an attempt to reach even more hungry children, Smith also is leading a summer food program known as “Talawanda Friends and Food,” which has run for the past two years. In the summer of 2016, the program distributed approximately 1050 bags of food, which was nearly double the quantity of the previous summer.

“The summer food program, an extension of the school year BackPack Program, continued to raise awareness of this service and draw the attention of more parents,” Smith said.

“The summer program has helped identify students that for reasons unknown were not added to the BackPack Program, but would benefit from the extra assistance,” Chrissy Rolfes, Community School Liaison for the district, said.

Debbie Crowder, a counselor at Kramer Elementary School, sees the BackPack Program as an important support system, acting as a safety net preventing students from falling through the cracks.

“I’m the school counselor so the kids come to me when they are having difficulties with friends or are sad about a home situation,” Crowder said. “I believe this program is important because it is a system that makes them feel cared for.”

Photo: A volunteer lifts boxes of bags of food and brings them into Kramer Elementary School for distribution. -- Photo by Mariel Padilla