With the Bridge Fire causing unanticipated school closures for the Snowline School District, Director of Nutrition Services Janice Carter took steps as soon as possible to get breakfast and lunch into the hands of kids who rely on those meals daily.
Janice started the process to get approval from the state to provide curbside meal distribution. Within a few days, approval had been granted. While waiting to hear from school administration on how many days the closure was anticipated to be, the nutrition staff who had not been evacuated started prepping meals for Thursday, Sept. 19’s curbside meal distribution. “Snowline JUSD Nutrition Services staff are amazing and will do their best to make sure our students get access to healthy meals,” said Janice.
At 11 a.m. on Thursday, the nutrition staff at five different school locations in the Tri-Community started distributing four days’ worth of breakfast, lunch, fruit, and milk to each child in the curbside drive-up line. The line of cars at Pinon Hills Elementary was steady but moved quickly as nutrition staff employees Susan, Kathy, and Tina worked together to streamline the process of determining how many meals were needed per child, per car. “It’s a huge help. You don’t realize how much they eat until they’re home all day. We love our schools!” shared grateful parent Carolina Gaytan.
At around 11:30 a.m., Pinon Hills Elementary had run out of meals to distribute and started sending cars to other participating school locations. Within an hour of starting the meal distributions, all locations had run out of the prepackaged meals and unfortunately had to start turning cars away.
With such a short time to prepare and only being able to use the food that the schools had on hand, the nutrition staff successfully distributed 11,352 meals to students in the community!
