In Durham and across North Carolina, as school years finish up, people are working to ensure students won’t go hungry over summer break.
Durham Public Schools Summer Meal Program plans to serve between 1,500 and 1,800 students per day, according to Linden Thayer, Durham Public Schools school nutrition planner. The DPS Summer Meals Program will run from June 17 to July 26 across roughly 30 sites, in community locations and schools, Thayer says.
The summer meals program is federally funded and has operated in Durham for more than 30 years. The meals are available for all students, regardless of income, who are 18 years old or younger.
While this program is able to reach students across the county, it’s not a perfect system Thayer says.
“Durham is one of the best counties in the state in terms of how many we reached in the summer and we still only reach about 10 percent of eligible students,” Thayer says. “That’s a big gap. I think we have a long way to go.”
While the county was under COVID-19 restrictions, students were able to take meals to go week by week. Now, students need to eat each meal onsite and come back each day for every meal they want provided, due to federal regulations, Thayer says. There are also a combination of open and closed sites; at open sites, students can walk in and get meals and at closed sites, students need to register in advance for meals. Most of DPS’s summer meals traffic comes from closed sites.
“We’ve had a lot of trouble figuring out where families are and what’s most accessible in this new era,” Thayer says.
There are also other federal meal programs throughout the state aimed at helping the portion of the 1.5 million students in NC public schools who may need summer meals, Tamara Baker, project and communications director for Carolina Hunger Initiative, says.
Not only in Durham County, the Summer Nutrition Program has 3,000 sites across the state where students can eat meals onsite. Another program offered statewide, which began last summer, is called Meals To Go.
This is helpful for the 82 out of 100 counties in North Carolina that are considered rural, Baker says.
“It’s a huge convenience factor, especially to try to reach rural children in North Carolina,” Baker says. “There’s a lot of rural territory in North Carolina.”
The third meal program is Summer Electronic Benefit Transfer, a federal and state-supported program which can be used with an EBT Card. Also referred to as Sun Bucks, this program adds $120 per each eligible child to an existing benefits card, or families can receive a card if they don’t already have one.
Sun Bucks participants in the Triangle can also have their $120 matched at various farmers’ markets for a total of $240 in benefits. Farmers’ markets participating in the Double Bucks program this summer include Durham Farmers’ Market, South Durham Farmers’ Market, Black Farmers’ Market, North Durham Farmers’ Market, Carrboro Farmers’ Market, Eno River Farmers’ Market, and Chapel Hill Farmers’ Market.
Sun Bucks is new this summer and was launched to help try and to meet the needs of families who need meals most. Across the country, one of six kids who needs meal assistance has received it, Baker says. One of the issues that these families face are lack of access to get to meals whether for lack of transportation or working parents having to get to certain locations at certain times.
“We are working really hard to make sure that we can increase that access for those very needy families,” Baker says.
Editor’s note: This story was updated to include information about the Double Bucks program at local farmers’ markets.
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