Across the nation, approximately 21 million students eat free or reduced-price meals throughout the school year, but when the school year ends only a small fraction of those children make it to schools or community centers for summer meals. Thankfully, that is starting to change with the help of some craftily repurposed school buses.
Murfreesboro City Schools is one school district that is trying to bring the meals to the children during summer with the Combating Hunger on Wheels Bus, or the CHOW bus as most know it.
Summer can be especially hard for parents living on a tight budget, but this way some of the stress is lifted off of struggling parents and children don’t have to worry about getting a nutritional meal during the week.
“When your kids are in school, you don’t really have to worry about feeding them at home during the day,” Erica Swain, a Murfreesboro mother, told WGBH. “So that adds on a bunch of money in the summertime”.
The program is funded by the USDA, which also ensures all meals served meet federal nutrition standards. Nearly $500 million was spent nationwide on the USDA program to bring summertime meals to students, but the agency expects to increase the figure in order to meet its goal of providing students 200 million meals this summer.
Estimates suggest the CHOW bus helped the city double the number of children who were fed last summer from approximately 30,000 meals to over 60,000.
But Murfreesboro isn’t the only city to get the idea of using a repurposed bus to bring nutritious and healthy lunches to students during summer. Jefferson County Public Schools has been operating a Bus Stop Cafes program for over three years, growing from a single school bus delivering food to a small number of locations to an entire fleet covering 92 schools across the county.
The program was inspired when administrators noticed they experienced similarly alarming drops in the numbers of students receiving meals during the summer. Approximately 56,000 students across the district receive free or reduced-price meals during the school year, only 4,000 students were returning to school for meals during the hottest months of the year.
“We’re going out to mobile home parks, public swimming pools and parks in order to reach these students. We want kids to have meals where they live and play,” said Julia Bauscher, director of nutritional services for JCPS.
The fleet unveiled five new buses this week, as well as a new Nutrislice smartphone app which will give parents an up-to-date menu to help them make healthy choices for their children’s lunch. The app also details bus locations and schools which participate in the program.
Repurposed school buses can provide a huge range of uses, but few choose to use the new reconstructed vehicle to help others. Murfreesboro and JCPS do just that with their repurposed buses which guarantee thousands of children a meal every day this summer.
