LMAS Healthy Snack Program
The snack program that provides fresh apples, bananas & oranges to students at Tahquamenon area schools began as a “No Kid Hungry” grant. The original plan was to provide a food pantry with easy grab and go meals for families or adolescents that could be made at home when food was in short supply or students were looking to cook for themselves because parents were working. Students could take a bag of supplies & a recipe card for a simple 5 ingredients or less meal.
The Counseling And Medical Place also known as “The CAMP” to students and area residents housed the pantry in a corner of the school based health center. We soon realized that students were finding out about the food pantry but were more interested in something they could grab to eat during the school day. The only items leaving the pantry were things they could grab & eat on the way to their next class or bring home in their backpack to eat later. After surveying the students, we found they were very interested in having a healthy snack available to them during the day. We wanted to ensure the snack going out was not a pre-packaged and processed food item, that it was truly something nutritious. We also wanted it to be something available to all the students in grades 7-12, who did not have a designated snack time during the day. We wanted to eliminate the shame that may come with food insecurity, if all the kids are grabbing a piece of fruit a student who would have gone hungry won’t be singled out by having to ask an adult for something to eat.
The local grocery store was able to give a discount on the fresh fruit and willing to deliver as needed to keep the shelves full of apples, bananas & oranges. Over the course of two years, we tried several different methods of getting snacks into the classrooms, we did have a handful of behavioral issues, but the teachers, administration, students and community agreed it was worth continuing. We were getting an average weekly delivery of 5 cases of apples, 2 cases of bananas, and 2 cases of oranges. Kids were eating the fruit and were disappointed if the supplies ran out early during the week. We found that the program not only reached the kids who might not have enough food at home, but also kids that simply don’t have fruit in the home, or maybe don’t ever remember eating an apple that was crisp and flavorful, or any fruit that they liked. We were reaching all the students and promoting healthy eating for all, food insecurity or not. We were reaching approximately 400 students daily; a healthy snack was available to all grades k-12.
We finally perfected a delivery system for the 2022/23 school year & more than half of 2023/24. The students loved the program and having fruit available. Teachers were onboard & everyone was happy with the snack program, just in time for funding to run out in April of 2024. The CAMP sent letters home requesting donations to keep the program running. A little money trickled in here and there, enough to get us through a week or so. We did a bigger Facebook promotion, and an article ran in the local newspaper, which drummed up the funds to help us limp through the last few days of the school year in June.
The 2024/25 school year is underway now, and we have recently moved into our new central location in a smaller setting at Tahquamenon Area Schools. Students, teachers and community members have been asking, “Do you have fruit today? Is the snack program coming back?” We currently do not have the staff to start another promotion, asking for donations and keeping the program running is a part time job all on its own. We are hopeful that we can revive the program after the moving process is truly complete, and we are caught up on our to-do list.
The CAMP has been in contact with our local grocery store and has found ways to cut costs and bring fruit costs down to approximately $400 a week.