District hopes cookouts will boost summer meal participation

Summer meal participation seems to be going into a rut, forcing districts to try to find ways to reach and entice students to get a healthy meal while school is out.

This is especially problematic for rural districts where the kids are scattered across a large geographic area, making them hard to reach. In Henry County in central Virginia south of Roanoke, one district is trying to use a popular summertime draw—the barbecue gril—to entice children and their families to come to the summer feeding site.

The district was recently able to secure a grant to purchase two large Belson Porta-Grills from the Share Our Strength Foundation after Director of School Nutrition Marci Lexa heard Fairfax County Nutrition Services Director Rodney Taylor talk about the success he’s had using cookout events to draw summer meal participation.

Of course, there are huge differences between densely populated Fairfax and sparsely populated Henry Counties.

“We’re in a rural area so it’s not like we can pull up to a park somewhere and there’s 150 kids running around,” Lexa observes, “but we do have trailer parks and areas of high need where houses are sort of crammed together, so that’s where we’re taking the grills.”

The two grills now each make two daily stops at sites chosen by Lexa to maximize the impact of the units. They operate Monday through Thursday. The program launched the first full week of June.

At one site where no meals were served last year, the cookouts are now drawing an average of 35 a day, “but the potential there is for close to 90, so I’m really hoping that continues to build,” Lexa offers. “And even now, 35 may not be many, but it’s 35 more than we were getting last year.”

Another site where the grill is setting up was already getting fair participation, but Lexa felt there was potential for significantly more, and indeed the grill’s presence has already goosed the daily number from 20 to 35 or more. “Over the past week it increased every day,” she says, “so word is getting out and people are coming from nearby neighborhoods too to the grill site.”

The menu being served off the grills is fairly standard and static: burgers, hot dogs, chicken patties. They come with a choice of hot or cold veggies and a canned fruit or bagged apple slices as sides.

The grills are generally operated by two-person teams: one to do the grilling; the other to serve and log meal counts. It’s free for kids while adults who bring a child pay $2 and others pay $3.

“We only have a short summer, so I’m hoping it continues to build by five or six a day, which is how it’s been going,” Lexa observes.

The program will run through July 27, after which the nutrition department has to begin preparations for the new school year, which begins August 9.

The grill program is an extension of an initiative the district launched last summer to boost participation by taking meals out of the three fixed production kitchen sites from where summer meals had traditionally been served exclusively.

“We decided to do some mobile sites where we would set up, serve the meals, wait for the kids to eat and then move on to the next site,” Lexa explains. There are now 13 such mobile meal sites to which food is brought either by the district’s van or, more commonly, by foodservice employees using their own vehicles.

“That saved us last year because meal counts had dropped [as the district halted] summer school for the elementary kids,” one of the few reasons kids had to show up at the sites, Lexa explains. “Because of the rural nature of the district, few kids are in walking distance of the sites, so parents have to bring them” and without a compelling reason like summer school classes, few do.

The economically depressed area has been losing population since its traditional textile and furniture industries fell victim to foreign competition, with the result that the school district has dropped from its peak of 25 school sites to the current 14. What remains is CEP qualified through the 8th grade with a free/reduced percentage in excess of 80 percent. The current enrollment is around 7,500.