By April 29, Alison Francis and her team had fed county children 269,375 meals.
The child nutrition director for Haywood County Schools, Francis has not slowed down as schools closed under a state order to help stem the tide of COVID-19.
If anything, Francis and her staff have been busier.
"We're actually probably feeding 30% more now than we do in the typical school year," she said.
According to data from MANNA FoodBank, 1 in 4 children in Western North Carolina live in a home without food to last over a typical weekend, let alone several seasons.
So as schools began to shutter in March, the U.S. Department of Agriculture tweaked its Summer Food Service Program to launch emergency measures to help keep kids fed.
The program, managed by the USDA's Food and Nutrition Service arm, usually only covers schools open for summer sessions.
But the federal government has issued waivers to allow even institutions empty of students to continue to nourish children.
Beginning March 17, Francis and her staff turned 13 of 15 Haywood County school sites into food hubs, with buses fanning out from the center to deliver breakfast and lunch to any child between the ages of 1 and 18.
"You don't even have to be one of our students," she said.
Haywood County children can pick up meals at one of the school distribution sites or at the bus stop, which works out to about 50,000 meals a week.
Balancing the budget a complex issue
Feeding so many children is not without its complexities, particularly when it comes to the budget, which takes about 30% of Francis' time to manage.
Close to $2 goes to each lunch and about $1.25 to each breakfast, and that doesn't include the labor.
The nutrition department must pay for everything up front, then submit a claim to the USDA for reimbursement.
"Fortunately, we have some cash on reserve, and that helps us prepare and purchase and buy what we need to prepare, and the money gets replaced once the claim comes in," Francis said.
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But money can be tight, and that's exacerbated by the fact that the cafeteria no longer has retail sales to pad out the budget.
A la carte food and snack sales make up about 15% of the nutrition department's revenue, and those sales are used to supplement the USDA's reimbursement funds, along with a small stipend from the state.
"That's why we sell snacks," said Francis. "If we didn't have to sell those, we wouldn't. My goal, before I retire, is that everybody just gets fed for free as part of their education."
But with retirement only 10 years away, she figures that's a pipe dream.
Now, during this once-in-a-lifetime crisis, Francis helps steer a team of regular food workers, plus teachers' assistants and custodians to continue to feed kids as long as it's needed.
"They're all considered essential, and we're just trying to keep them working," Francis said. "It's a team effort for sure."
A fleet of buses feeding kids
By now, the feeding teams have the work down to a science.
They form a socially distanced assembly line, wrapping grilled chicken and romaine in tortillas, bagging up fruit or vegetables, and packing cold lunches and breakfasts with milk in coolers for distribution the next morning.
Hitting their regular routes, 68 buses roll out as early as 5:30 a.m. every weekday except Friday, delivering lunch and breakfast for the day. On Thursdays, they bring enough to cover kids' meals for two days.
But that represents only about 40% of the food distributed throughout the county, with the remainder picked up at school distribution sites from 11 a.m.-1 p.m.
Francis said that speaks to the remote nature of some of the neighborhoods the Summer Feeding Program serves.
"A lot of our folks are deep out there," Francis said.
But it also speaks to the food: What's distributed on buses has to be cold or shelf stable. Hot meals are available only at pickup sites, and could include comfort food, like mashed potatoes.
"There's only so many turkey sandwiches you can eat," Francis laughed.
The nutrition staff who remain at work, excepting only some with preexisting health conditions, delight at seeing families pick up their food.
"They know they're making a difference and they're proud to be a school nutrition employee," Francis said.
Still, it's not the same.
"Even though they're still going in and fixing food, the atmosphere is completely different," Francis said. "The hum of the kids, the laughter, seeing their faces every day — it's just not the same."
Still, they do the work happily, Francis said.
"They've always worked hard, but they're working probably twice as hard now on the front line because they want to make sure children don't go without food," she said.
Seeds for students
Charlie Jackson, the executive director of the Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project, echoes Francis' sentiments.
"School nutrition needs our support," he said. "The staff doing the cooking and packaging and other work to prepare and deliver meals need to be recognized."
To supplement the schools' work, ASAP ordered 2,400 packets of seeds from Seed Programs International, an Asheville-based hunger relief program, for distribution through Buncombe County and Haywood County School Nutrition meal sites.
Francis expects seeds to begin going out to students this week.
Buncombe County School nutrition director Lisa Payne, who also sits on the board of ASAP, said the same.
"And we'll distribute them with our meals," she said.
Buncombe County Schools Nutrition staff cook about 80,000 meals per week for county children from birth-18 years old. The meals are cooked at 15 schools and are available for both delivery and pickup.
That monumental task is executed by more than 128 nutrition employees, 52 bus drivers, plus custodians and school resource officers, administrators and secretaries.
Members of the North Carolina National Guard sometimes ride along on buses to help hand out meals.
"They're all part of the school lunch hero team," Payne said.
Those numbers sound big — and they are — but the team still feeds fewer kids now than it does during the regular school year.
"It was just switching gears from feeding students in the cafeteria to packing food to go, and we shifted very quickly from traditional food service to a to-go operation."
Though Payne sounds stoic, she admitted feeling emotional in the midst of emergency measures to feed kids in Buncombe County, where slightly more than half of students are on a free or reduced-cost lunch program.
"I have cried more in the last seven weeks than I have in a long time over the humanitarian effort behind this and the gratitude the community is showing," she said.
One first grader became uncommonly excited over a carton of milk.
"She took her milk container out of the bag and said, 'Oh my goodness, it's just like school,'" Payne said. "It's been a comfort to students to still have a piece of normalcy in their lives."
___
Mackensy Lunsford has lived in Asheville for more than 20 years, and has been a staff writer for the Asheville Citizen Times since 2012. Lunsford is a former professional line cook and one-time restaurant owner.
Reach me: mlunsford@citizentimes.com.
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