Hillsborough County Public Schools’ Grab and Go program has been extremely important for food insecure families since schools have been closed, as it’s provided kids who visit pick-up sites with two free meals, five days a week.
This week, HCPS announced its first major change for the program since expanding the number of pick-up sites. All 147 sites, from schools to places where buses carrying food park and distribute, will now only be open on Wednesdays from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. and kids will be given enough meals for the week with that one stop.
“It would be nice to still do it five days a week but, with what’s going on, it’s understandable they’re not taking that chance of getting us exposed more, and it’s less exposure for the children and parents getting their meals,” Area 6 field inspector Terri Godwin said.
The program started shortly after schools were forced to close in March with a limited number of pick-up sites, which for the Plant City area was all three public high schools. Now, nearly every public school in the Plant City area is a pick-up site and they distribute up to thousands of meals each week.
Meal bags have typically included milk, juice, fruit and cereal or protein bars for breakfast, plus hot entrees like hamburgers, pizza and chicken nuggets for lunch. With Wednesday’s changes, families will now get to take home a loaf of bread, a pound of lunchmeat, snacks, milk, juices, cereal and more to help them get from Wednesday to Wednesday.
At the schools themselves, cafeteria staff works behind the scenes to prepare and pack hot, cold and room-temperature meals each day. They run the bags to schools’ bus ramps for school staffers to hand to families through their car windows, but the switch now means school staff will have to put the big meal bags in trunks or back seats since they can’t easily be passed through a passenger or driver window.
The only requirement for getting the meals is for parents or guardians to bring their children with them, and they’ve been coming out in droves.
“It’s been crazy — crazy good,” Plant City High School principal Susan Sullivan said. “We’ve been serving on the ramp and last week we did 1,600 to 1,800 on the ramp, plus another four to five hundred with our buses.”
Buses from each school also travel to several designated sites each day to distribute the meals. They stop at each location for 30 minutes or more depending on their supply, and pass out meals to whoever comes up to them (with kids present, of course). Each bus is staffed with two drivers, one school security officer, a nutritionist and an ESE attendant. In the event the buses run out of food before they’ve finished making their rounds, someone on the bus will contact a school’s cafeteria workers and arrange for more to be delivered to them.
Beth Rountree, an area 6 bus driver, said many parents didn’t know about the bus stops at first but have been quick to take advantage of the mobile meals once they did learn about it. Some of her stops include Speer Park, where she said 113 lunches were served on April 9, and Keel Farms, where families visiting for U-picks have been surprised to see the buses there and end up using the service.
“When we go to Speer Park, we get there before 9,” Rountree said. “We pulled in at 8:50 (on April 9) and they were already waiting on us. We stayed till 9:40 to make sure everyone got their bags.”
Godwin, who works in Strawberry Crest High School’s area, said its seven buses handed out nearly 2,000 meals last week. In three days this week, her drivers handed out 1,686.
“I had one mom about made me cry, she came up to get the meals and kept saying ‘God bless y’all,’” Godwin said. “That makes it worth it.”
Though lowering the risk of infection among HCPS workers and families who receive food is undoubtedly a good thing, the move to cut down to one pick-up day per week may have created a logistical problem for families in need of food.
On April 9, as the April 10 non-student holiday was still to be observed, schools and buses had to hand out two sets of meals at once to make up for Grab and Go taking the day off. Sullivan said that was the only day PCHS ran out of food, but that it would be “interesting to see” what happens with food supply now that families only have one pick-up day per week.
It was, indeed, an interesting Wednesday. At PCHS, dozens upon dozens of cars snaked along every inch of the bus ramp from start to finish, sometimes spread only six inches apart from bumper to bumper. Smiling school staff members organized the week’s worth of food items into four bags per child and was able to pass them through the window while others ran supplies to and from the cafeteria on a John Deere Gator. By 11 a.m., Sullivan said, she heard both Marshall Middle Magnet and Knights Elementary had already run out of food.
To ease that potential burden on its own clientele, Sullivan said earlier this week PCHS staff will now provide information on-site about the United Food Bank of Plant City to help families fulfill their needs in the event they need more than what the Grab and Go sites are now able to provide for a week.
For a full list of Grab and Go schools and bus stops, visit HillsboroughSchools.org.