School meals free for Kansas City students, but almost no one shows up at this spot
With schools closed for coronavirus concerns, a Kansas City charter school wanted to make sure no one would miss getting school lunch, so it set up free meal distribution around the city.
But on Tuesday, the second day for the food giveaway, only two children showed up at Urban Youth Academy, one of the nine spots the Ewing Marion Kauffman School chose to hand out lunch and breakfast to anyone under the age of 19 who stopped by.
When schools were ordered closed to slow the spread of COVID-19, school districts and charter schools worried that children, many of whom depend on the school lunch program to get a daily meal, would go hungry. Schools are closed in Kansas City through April 24, at least. In Kansas, they’re out the rest of the school year.
School districts around the metro have launched daily meal programs. The largest, run by Kansas City Public Schools, has handed more than 30,000 free meals since last Thursday.
Kauffman coordinated with several places around the city, like the Urban Youth Academy, which allowed the charter school to park its yellow buses, packed with around 80 lunch and breakfast meals, in front of its building at 1622 E. 17th Terrace.
“We had no part in the distribution,” said Angel McGee, spokeswoman for the Urban Youth Academy, a sports academy affiliated with Major League Baseball. The academy has been closed since March 13 but agreed to lend parking space to the Kauffman School to hand out the meals, McGee said.
Turns out “Kansas City Urban Youth Academy proved to be the one stop that has not been very popular,” said Katie Pasniewski, chief executive officer for the Kauffman School. On Monday only six students picked up a meal there. She said that at other sites overall, her charter school handed out 273 meals on Monday and 330 on Tuesday, including a drive-thru grab and go in the parking lot of the charter school at 6401 Paseo Blvd.
At that site, families can get a week’s worth of food in one pickup. All of the schools that designed food distribution methods have lunches and breakfasts prepared by their food service workers or the food companies they contract with. It was a way to keep those staff workers employed during the school closure, Pasniewski said.
Pasniewski said Kauffman will continue to distribute food from the Urban Youth Academy site for the remainder of the week in case some parents had planned to get food there other days. But “now that we have a couple of days of data we may be making some adjustments next week.” She said the school will look for another site and may eventually move to a site “more convenient for families.”
Leftover food will be evaluated, and “anything shelf stable will be reused,” Pasniewski said. “But anything that we would not reuse at school ends up being thrown away.” Some sites reported running out of food and had to have meals run over to them from other sites. “We try to walk the line, making sure we don’t run out and limiting waste,” Pasniewski said.
Not far from the youth academy site, Kansas City Public Schools was also giving out free breakfast and lunch on Tuesday to its students and anyone else 18 and younger who walked up at Central High School 3221 Indiana Ave.
Central was one of the five sites where KCPS is give out meals 7 to 11 a.m. and 1 to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday.
In Kansas Shawnee Mission schools also began a pick-up and go food distribution for students on Tuesday.
“The day went well, and recipients were grateful,” said David Smith, district spokesman. The district handed out 1,062 meals (breakfast and lunch count as one). It had planned for 1,000, and school officials said they hope numbers will grow with warmer weather expected in the next couple of days.
Elsewhere in the Kansas City area districts reported success with their school lunch distribution.
Olathe had nine sites and distributed approximately 1,700 meals. Independence distributed 1,670 meals.
Lee’s Summit started on Monday and gave out 2,000 meals at more than 12 sites. Tuesday it distributed 3,200.
Hickman Mills gave out meals at 11 sites but was still calculating how many went out to students.
Includes reporting by The Star’s Sarah Ritter.
This story was originally published March 24, 2020 at 5:06 PM.
