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But Executive Director Cindy Stevens knows there are more hungry people out there, many of them children. Starting next month, she’ll be packing up boxes of kid-friendly food to stock freshly built shelves in Claremont schools.
“Knowing the needs of the children in the community, we just thought, how can we get food to them easily?” said Stevens, who has been working with school administrators and community members to plan the in-school food pantries for about a year. “The schools are an easy route to get the food home.”
The new food shelves, which will be installed at both of Claremont’s public elementary schools, and at the middle and high schools, and rolled out after the holiday break, will contain non-perishable, ready-to-eat and easy-to-prepare items such as granola bars, instant oatmeal, pop-top soups and microwavable macaroni and cheese, said Stevens, who specifically requested these types of items in the latest edition of the annual holiday letter she sends to community members.
“We’re looking for easy items that a child could prepare if they were on their own,” she said.
The idea for the pantries grew out of a summer community lunch program the food pantry and Claremont schools have been participating in for the past few years. Along with helping provide free lunch to children every weekday throughout the summer, the soup kitchen ran a mobile food pantry at which kids could select items before going home.
Last year, members of the soup kitchen’s food access committee, which includes representatives from several area organizations, decided that the local schools would be a logical place to continue the concept year-round. School administrators embraced the idea and have been working on finding space for the food shelves.
“We’re very excited as a district to have food shelves in our schools, accessible to our students who experience food instability,” said Cory LeClair, assistant superintendent of SAU 6, which oversees the Claremont and Unity school districts. “We’re excited that … the work that’s been done is finally coming to fruition in the next couple weeks, just giving our students one more opportunity to have what they need to be successful.”
The number of students who qualify for free or reduced-price school lunch in the district ranges from about 43 percent at Stevens High School to nearly 70 percent at the Bluff School, according to the New Hampshire Department of Education. Those numbers are well above the state average of about 27 percent, and they suggest that a significant number of Claremont families struggle with food insecurity. In 2017, 7.7 percent of U.S. households with children faced food insecurity, defined as having difficulty at some time during the year providing enough food for all family members, according to the United States Department of Agriculture. Not surprisingly, rates of food insecurity were higher than the national average for households with incomes near or below the federal poverty line.
This fall, the Claremont School Board wrestled with how to handle nearly $33,000 of unpaid school lunch and breakfast debt. Ultimately, an anonymous donation of $29,000, along with smaller donations from 10 other donors, wiped out the debt after it was publicized in the media. The debt did not originate from families using the free and reduced lunch program, but school officials said they suspected many of the families whose accounts were in arrears may have qualified for the program but had not completed the paperwork.
Stevens said she didn’t know about the debt problem when she and other committee members began planning the pantries, but she was well aware that children were coming to school hungry. She said she learned in conversations with school officials as well as her own children, who attend Claremont schools, that some teachers spend their own money to stock snack drawers for students who complain of hunger during class. “We thought this would alleviate some of the burden on them as well,” she said.
The food pantries will be open to all students, from those who simply forgot to bring a lunch on a given day to those who regularly go home to empty cabinets or have to prepare their own food because their parents are working the night shift.
“We definitely don’t want there to be a stigma behind it,” Stevens said.
LaValley Buildling Supply donated lumber for the pantries, and students in Michael Bennett’s introduction to carpentry and finishing class at Sugar River Valley Regional Technical Center are building and painting them. Students in the class are generally enthusiastic about all of their building projects, Bennett said, but this one is especially satisfying. “I think it definitely affects the feel-good part of it,” he said.
When the pantries are up and running, Claremont will be one of just a few New Hampshire school districts offering such a resource to its students. About two years ago, Mascoma Valley Regional High School in Canaan began hosting a food pantry, stocked by the non-profit Friends Feeding Friends program. Though the group hadn’t originally intended to address hunger and food access, early discussions with school staff revealed the severity of the problem, as well as its connection to academic success.
Nationally, schools have begun to play a larger role in getting food to people who need it. Feeding America, a network of food banks and food pantries around the country, operates a school pantry program that works with schools to serve 21 million meals to 110,000 children every year.
While planning the pantries for the public schools, the soup kitchen has already begun sending boxes of food to the junior-senior high campus of Claremont Christian Academy. School Principal Tim Groos said the school goes through about one medium-size box of food a month. The school doesn’t restrict who can take items from the pantry but does put a limit on how much each child can take, Groos said. “If they don’t have anything to eat (for lunch), I allow them to take three things,” he said.
The school is not part of the National School Lunch Program that tracks poverty data school by school, but Groos said he’s pretty well acquainted with the young people and their families and knows which ones may be dealing with food insecurity. Of the school’s 60-70 students, between five and 10 lack adequate food on a regular basis, and two or three struggle nearly every day, he said.
In larger populations, it’s not always so easy to tell which children are struggling. Stevens often wonders about the children her staff and volunteers serve at the soup kitchen.
“We can feed them dinner, but we don’t know what happens from there,” she said. “We’re just looking for another way to help the kids.”
To donate to the Claremont Soup Kitchen’s new school food pantries, call 603-543-3290 or visit the organization at 53 Central St.
Sarah Earle can be reached at searle@vnews.com and 603-727-3268.