Moorhead Public Schools’ summer food program provided breakfasts for nearly 13,000 children and 25,500 lunches for children up to age 18 last summer. (Photo/Moorhead Public Schools.)
Nancy Edmonds Hanson
Hunger doesn’t take a break for the summer.
School may be out, but Moorhead’s public school system has continued to serve up healthy meals for local kids five days a week – absolutely free.
“The district has been providing free summer meals as long as I’m aware of,” says Ashley Schneider, the district’s director of food and nutrition services. “School kids don’t pay for transportation, books or the Chromebooks they use. They shouldn’t have to pay for food, either.”
She adds, “Minnesota is great. We learned throughout Covid that it’s not up to us to decide who can or can’t afford meals with all the upheaval – inflated food costs, the high prices of eggs and so on. That experience humbled us all.”
The right to eat at schools, regardless of ability to pay the bill, inspired the Minnesota Legislature’s approval of free school meals. That will begin this fall, joining an older law preventing children from being shamed when parents can’t or haven’t paid for their meals.
But while the universal free-meal provision may be new when the next school term begins Aug. 24, the Summer Food Service Program – ultimately funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture via the Minnesota Department of Education – has been providing breakfast and lunch all summer long for every child up to age 18, both in several school lunch rooms and in parks around the city.
Breakfast is served from 7:15 to 8:15 at S.G. Reinertson, Ellen Hopkins and Robert Asp elementary schools five days a week, as well as from 7:45 to 8:15 at the Career Academy. Lunch is from 11 a.m. until noon at the elementaries and from noon to 12:30 at the academy.
Lunch is also served from Tuesday through Friday in three parks – Queens, 3201 20th St. S.; Romkey, 1800 19th St. S.; and Arrowhead, 2600 Sixth Ave. N. The bright orange Spudmobile, an old, brightly painted pickup truck with the familiar potato graphics, shows up at 11:45 a.m. at Queens, 11:40 at Romkey and 12:35 at Arrowhead. All meals have to be eaten where they’re picked up.
That’s a change from the pandemic summers, when grab-n-go lunches were the way to go.
The meal service is targeted to locations that meet federal qualifying guidelines based on school data and income eligibility, as defined by U.S. Census data. Those guidelines limit the program from feeding kids at Horizon Middle School, Dorothy Dodds Elementary and Moorhead High.
According to Schneider, the number of young people taking part in the program has held steady over the last two post-Covid years. Nearly 13,000 breakfasts and more than 25,000 lunches were served in 2022, she says. Cost of the program, supported through the federal and state funding, is about $85,000 for the three-month program.
Figuring out how many to prepare for is something of an art, Schneider says. “It’s a huge guessing game,” she concedes. “No one quite knows the numbers for the first few weeks, though our head cooks know their communities and their kids pretty well. But now we’re in week four, and our cooks have found their groove.”
The full meal schedule can be found at https://www.isd152.org/article/754881.
