Georgia school district starts weekend meal program for needy students

AUGUSTA, Ga. — Bayvale Elementary pupil Demarion Calloway looks forward to Friday afternoons, and not because it means the weekend is almost here.

When 2 o’clock rolls around and students begin lining up outside the school’s Parent Facilitator office, the 10-year-old starts passing out clear plastic bags packed with canned goods, juice, cereal and other nonperishable foods.

As children walk into the office Demarion helps them put the food in their book bags, sending them back to their rooms when he is done. After 15 minutes, he’s given packages of food to kindergartners, first- and second-grade students.

“This feels good to me,” Demarion said as he took a break from his work. “I like helping our school give food to hungry kids.”

Demarion is one of the volunteers working in Bayvale’s BackPack program, which provides two weekend meals to 100 students whose families struggle to keep them fed.

The BackPack program, created last year through a partnership between Golden Harvest Food Bank and the Richmond County school system, provides 38 weeks of weekend and holiday meals to schools with high levels of poverty, such as Bayvale and Meadowbrook Elementary schools.

The meals are funded through a $214,000 donation from Wal-Mart and John Deere to the food bank. The packages include breakfast and lunch items, and are designed to be “just like the meals they get from their schools” according to Title 1 Parent Facilitator Valarie Nixon.

At Bayvale, teachers enrolled some students in the program based on their needs, then opened up the remaining slots on a first-come basis.

In 2012, Georgia had one of the “highest rates of food insecure children under 18,” according to a food bank news release. Bayvale Principal Dana Harris said she had seen many hungry students struggle, and their hunger affected school performance in observable ways.