Giving Compass' Take:

• The California Department of Education was able to coordinate with other community-based organizations to prepare and distribute meals for kids amid the COVID-19 pandemic. 

• What collaborations are happening in your community to support students during this time? 

• Check Feeding America's emergency response fund. 

As we compel everyone to stay put for personal and public health reasons during the coronavirus emergency, we must consider other ways to get food to kids living in households where the refrigerator and kitchen shelves often are mostly empty. This is a place where nontraditional partners like our public housing and nonprofit housing organizations play a critical role.

While I’m feeling impatient to hear more about when and how remote teaching and learning will happen, I have been incredibly impressed with how quickly my school district, West Contra Costa Unified, got a system up and running for meal pickups at many school and community sites. This, appropriately, was a first priority in a district in which so many students rely on school meals.

To make sure we get meals to all the kids who need them, we should also be delivering meals through the subsidized housing communities where many of our most vulnerable kids live and likely rely on school meals. Not all parents or caregivers have a way to get kids to school sites for meal pickup, making this closer-to-home option even more essential. Delivering meals where the children live reduces the need for transporting them to school or other sites and avoids the danger of community spread of the coronavirus.

Anticipating the severe effect losing school meals would have on the most vulnerable students, the California Department of Education was quick to request a waiver from the U.S. Department of Education to enable school districts, local government agencies and community-based organizations that already have been approved to operate summer food service, to distribute emergency meals now to children in their communities.

Read the full article about school districts coming together to feed kids by Jennifer Peck at EdSource.