K-12 schools fight their own food insecurity battles

Food insecurity doesn’t only affect students at the college level. In the U.S., one in five children under the age of 18 also face food insecurity. Nowhere is the situation as dire as in New Mexico, where nearly 30 percent of children are food insecure—the highest rate in the country, according to Feeding America’s 2014 Map the Meal Gap survey.

In Las Cruces, N. M., on the first Monday of every month, 90 families gather at Columbia Elementary School to receive food from a mobile food pantry. At a school where 90 percent of the students qualify for a free or reduced-price lunch, the pantry helps to ensure that students have enough food when they are at home.

This situation is hardly unique to Columbia—or even Las Cruces, according to Sonya Warwick, a spokesperson for Roadrunner Food Bank in Albuquerque, N.M.

“About 150,000 children [in the state] are experiencing hunger,” says Warwick “In a population of only 2 million, that’s a significant portion of hungry people.”

Once a month, a truck from Roadrunner Food Bank arrives at Columbia Elementary School with produce, meat and non-perishables. Boxes are distributed to families from Columbia and neighboring Dona Ana Elementary School.

Even when families qualify for government assistance, it’s not always enough, says Annette Lopez, a social worker at Columbia.  “A lot of times, food stamps don’t cover the whole month,” she says. “Towards the end of the month, they are really scraping the bottom of the barrel.”

A similar situation unfolds each month at Adobe Acres Elementary School in Albuquerque. It’s not uncommon to see Principal Annittra Atler hustling food out of a truck from Roadrunner Food Bank to fill her school’s mobile food pantry.

The school receives 2,500 pounds—enough to provide 50 families with 50 pounds of food. Volunteers take supplies to a pantry and organize the food according to frozen, produce, meat, dairy and snacks. Families come through and pick out an allotted amount from each category. 

Through conversations with parents, Atler has noticed that many in need often don’t speak up because they feel that there is another family that could use the help even more. By encouraging parents to volunteer, she builds relationships with parents who have been reluctant to ask for help.

“When you get to know people more, you can say, ‘It’s okay, you do need it,’” she says. “I’ve had parents come back to me and say, ‘I’ve never gone to a food pantry, but this helps more than you will ever know.’”

Ironically, although both schools receive donations from the Roadrunner Food Bank, their cafeterias are unable to donate directly to the school pantries. USDA guidelines state that food can be donated only to non-profit organizations, and because the pantries are located on school property, they don’t fit that description. “They don’t only because they can’t,” Atler says.

Lopez believes that the service provided by the mobile pantry at Columbia Elementary School has allowed students to perform better academically, in part because they aren’t worrying about where their next meal could come from.

“It allows them the freedom to focus on school, focus on learning and just be an all-around kid,” she says. “We can’t expect kids to learn if they are not having their basic needs met.”