The little boy – maybe 10 years old – sits in
the school nurse's office, sick to his empty stomach. There isn't enough
food at home for the boy and his younger brother and sister. So he
makes sure they eat, while he goes hungry.
Another
little boy is so famished, he walks six blocks in the 100-degree heat
to the pool where there's a free summer lunch program. When he gets
there, he ignores the cool water so he can eat, in needy silence.
But
at least these children didn't have to prowl through the garbage to
find food – like a few kids had to do in Middletown, recalls Chris
Brinckerhoff, assistant superintendent of Middletown's Recreation and
Parks Department.
These are just a few of the record number of hungry school children in Orange, Ulster and Sullivan counties.
In
the past five years, or since the Great Recession began, the number of
children who can't afford food and must rely on free or reduced-price
school meals has soared to what one top child-nutrition expert in New
York, Rachel Hye Youn Rupright of Hunger Solutions, terms “absolutely an
all-time high” of some 40 percent of all local students.
That number – about 39,000, according to the latest state records – is an increase of about 6,000 over the past 5 years. In
Sullivan County, the 54 percent of children who can't afford food is
now nearly 20 percentage points above the state average, not including
New York City. As the amount of needy kids
climbs – with the number of local children needing food stamps nearly
doubling in the past five years – a summer program that feeds kids when
schools are closed can't come close to keeping pace.
This,
despite the fact that the number of local sites for that federal/state
Summer Food Service Program has grown in the past two years, from 20 to
32. “Despite the success of (the program),
there are still many children and teenagers who miss out,” says Rupright
of Hunger Solutions, a contact for the program.
In
Orange County, only one of four needy kids who eat free or reduced
price meals during the school year also eat the summer meals. In Sullivan – with one of the state's highest poverty rates – the percentage is 13 percent. In
Ulster, the percentage of hungry kids who receive free food such as
cereal, sandwiches, milk and fruit in the summer food program is just 4
percent – although three Kingston schools do continue to serve free and
reduced meals to qualified kids throughout the summer.
“We're
nowhere near meeting the need,” says Monticello schools lunch manager
Debra Donleavy, in the district which has seen the percentage of
food-needy students climb from 51 percent in 2007 to 63 percent this
year. She notes that Monticello, which served 5,000 summer meals in 2009, now serves 40,000.
“And
there's still a huge gap,” she adds, noting that her goal is to
increase the number of summer sites in the district that stretches from
Bethel to Wurtsboro.
The hard fact of local life is this: “A lot of kids, they just don't have food,” says John Merchant, who
helps train counselors for Middletown's Recreation and Parks
Department's Little People Playtime summer camp, which also serves as a
site for that summer program.
“I just don't
remember it ever being this bad,” adds Vonnie Hubbard of Abraham's Table
summer food service program in Newburgh, which serves up to 1,200 free
meals per day at various locations throughout the city, where 65 percent
of all students need free or reduced- price food, and where some kids
are so hungry that they hoard the sandwiches, cereals and fruit
available to any child under 18. "It just breaks your heart," adds Hubbard, a former food service coordinator in the Beacon and Stony Point school districts.
The
need for more summer food programs is especially acute because hunger
and poverty have been spreading throughout our region, to rural school
districts like Pine Bush, Livingston Manor and Onteora.
The
need has also spread to relatively suburban areas like Chester, where
the number of children who need help with food has doubled, and Goshen,
where that number has nearly doubled.
They're
areas where the population isn't as concentrated as Middletown, Newburgh
or Monticello. They're also areas where public transportation to free
food spots is spotty at best — especially now that budget cuts have
drastically reduced public bus service. Plus,
many of those rural areas still don't meet the traditional criteria for
summer food programs — that 50 percent of the children in a school
district must qualify for school meal assistance, although areas can
also qualify by meeting certain census data.
The
need is so great in Goshen — in the farm-rich Black Dirt region — that
the school district's Youth Ending Hunger Club has had to double the
amount of meals it hands out — to 90 families, compared with 45 just a
year ago. "The problem is getting worse, not better," says Sue Anne Dropkin, an adviser to the club.
Another
reason the problem is exacerbated in some districts without summer food
service sites is that summer school programs have been slashed. So
hundreds of kids who were guaranteed the meals that "help immensely,"
says an aunt of six hungry kids, have nowhere to turn.
"The kids that need the most are getting the least," says Dropkin. This
is why some districts, like Pine Bush — which has a summer food program
in Circleville — are adding summer sites for next year in their more
rural areas. This is why Donleavy of Monticello wants to expand to
Wurtsboro. And this is also why she says she'd like to see a summer
program in an area like Minisink Valley, where one-fifth of all students
receive financial help with food.
The growing
need of the soaring number of hungry children is why some folks fear
that right now, when there aren't enough summer food programs to feed
the thousands of needy children, many kids are going hungry.
"Until
school begins, we know these are the only meals of the day for some
kids," says Brinckerhoff of Middletown. So what do they do on the
weekends?"
The answer is not pretty.
"Some of these kids get their two meals day at school, and the rest of the time, they don't get anything," says Donleavy.
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