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rom School Cafeteria Manager and School Garden Coordinator Jessica Puzak, Amanda C. Rowe Elementary School :
"I began curbside pickup of free meals for children age 18 and under, which then quickly became free meals for all ages. I average around 100 meals a day...My site is one of ten free meal sites throughout Portland, and we have donations of canned/dry goods and produce bags from
The Locker Project
once a week. This has been an effective and successful partnership to supplement what the PPS Food Service Department is able to offer right now. Each bagged meal meets the USDA meal pattern required for adequate nutrition, and for reimbursement.
There is still a lot of uncertainty from my perspective about how the summer will proceed.
Centralizing summer feeding to one or two locations may end up being the case, but I feel this is not ideal given the very real barriers to access that exist for many of the most at-risk community members I serve each day at Rowe.
I am resolved to grow as much food as I can from the courtyard garden space, and
set up a system for free school garden produce distribution to supplement the summer feeding program.
I am interested to see how successful it is to elevate the school garden as an essential community food security opportunity that it truly is, along with being an outdoor classroom space
. My hope is that this pandemic teaches all of us to see the power in a school garden, for learning, and for providing,
and that this will translate to policy and investment in this infrastructure as a whole.
What we are worrying about now
is our school garden plan for the fall. We have 2 wonderful school gardens that are used for both school nutrition and education...What we do not want to happen is for our staff to put in hours upon hours of hard work this spring and summer only find out our kids will not be able to access the gardens come the fall.
We would love to know how other districts are handling this, what some have come up with for contingency plans."
