Since COVID-19’s impact in the state of Georgia pushed schools to close for the safety of students, getting meals to those in need was a top priority for Habersham School’s Nutrition Team. This group of dedicated individuals, headed by Nutrition Director Andrea Thomas, has worked hard to find solutions to feed their students.
One of the nutrition staff’s biggest challenges was safety. “How do we safely go about serving meals to students, keeping our staff safe, and keeping the community safe?” said Thomas. “We opted to go ahead and open up drive-through feeding sites at all eight of our elementary schools, that gave good coverage throughout the county.”
After finding a system that worked for feeding Habersham’s students and keeping the nutrition staff and students safe, their community joined together to care for them. Local businesses brought the staff lunch, organizations brought gift bags, and students showed their thanks.
“We had students that really appreciated it, came up, and told the staff how much they needed it,” Thomas said. “They would get little cards, gifts, flowers; it was definitely appreciated by the community.”
These are the members of the elementary school nutrition teams who kept Habersham students fed during the pandemic and continue to feed them through the summer months.
Team effort
It wasn’t just the Habersham community showing their love for the nutrition staff that helped them get through the end of the school year, but the hard work of the other departments in the Habersham schools. “We couldn’t have done this without the help of transportation,” Thomas says. “They were taking meals to families that said that they didn’t have transportation or any way to get to the school.”
Habersham School’s transportation department ran six different routes to get meals to students in need, and where buses couldn’t get, school resource officers stepped in. Social workers and principals went through calls from families who needed help. “It was a community effort,” Thomas said. “It was us making the meals, but it took a big effort to get the meals out to where they were needed.”
Even with the school year over, Habersham’s nutrition team is still working hard to feed minors within the county with the summer meal program. “We’re still serving a lot more meals this summer than we have any other summer,” Thomas says. “but it’s [fewer] meals than what we were doing from March through May.”
How you can help
With this difficult time many families find themselves in, the best way the community can get involved with Habersham School’s nutrition is to help pay off student debt– that is, the cost of meals the children and their families can’t afford. “We make every attempt to let the parent know that the child needs money, but we still have a good bit of student debt,” Thomas says.
Anyone that wants to help pay off student debt can do so by sending a donation to PO Box 70 in Clarkesville, Georgia (30523). Thomas says that donations can be specified for a particular school, or for any debt in the county. “Helping pay off student charges is where we need help,” Thomas says. “We have a charge policy where if a child comes to school and does not have money, we in good faith provide them a hot meal.”
According to Thomas, those student debts across Habersham county add up to around $18,000 right now. “We’re just gracious to have any amount of help in that department, we greatly appreciate it.”
Meals are eligible to Habersham students 18 years old or younger, Monday through Thursday until July 23, 2020.
