New Castle School District program helps put food on the table for hundreds of students
With the high cost of food, federal furloughs and now the potential impact on Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, many families are struggling to put food on the table.
The New Castle School District is hit especially hard. Seventy-six percent of the families in the district get SNAP benefits for food assistance, but a program run by the school has been helping families with food for more than a decade.
What is the program?
Packing bags of food is a weekly tradition at New Castle School District. Students on teams or in clubs sign up as groups to help in an assembly-line fashion. Teachers and staff also pitch in.
The district sends hundreds of kids home with meals to last all weekend. Ninety-one percent of students in the New Castle School District are from low socioeconomic status.
Tabitha Marino, the assistant superintendent, explains that students get three dinners, two breakfasts, two lunches, and snacks for the weekend.
"All of it's kid-friendly, shelf-stable, because we don't know about refrigeration," Marino said.
Marino started the food distribution program in 2014, providing food for the weekend to 25 kids. Now, 300 to 400 students in the New Castle School District get meals they can make themselves every weekend.
"We can't assume that the house has a stove," Marino says. "We can't assume that the house has a refrigerator. We can't assume that maybe somebody is home. Maybe [the adult] is at work [and not able to help] them prepare this food, so we wanted to make sure it was kid-friendly, shelf-stable, easy to prepare."
The four charitable foundations that primarily fund the food distribution program told the New Castle School District that they would fund any school district in Lawrence County that also offered a similar food distribution program if the New Castle School District taught them how to do it.
Now, a similar model is working in seven school districts, feeding about 650 students county-wide.
It takes a lot of volunteers and donations to make this happen. Every month, two tractor-trailers deliver food from the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank to a food pantry in Lawrence County for all seven school districts. That's then distributed to churches where it's stored, sorted and packed by volunteers.
"We do everything we can to help our families out," Gregg Paladin, superintendent of the New Castle School District, said. "It's just one of those things that, if more stress is caused by no SNAP benefits or something like that, we'd be in trouble. The community would be in trouble."
If you'd like to help the food distribution program at New Castle Schools, you can email Marino at tmarino@ncasd.com. You can also write a check payable to: Community Foundation. On the memo line of the check, write: New Castle Bread Basket Program. Mail it to: The Community Foundation of Western PA & Eastern Ohio, 7 West State Stree, Suite 301, Sharon, PA 16146.
You can find many more resources for families at Kidsburgh.