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NEW BEDFORD — The thermometer reads 88 degrees, but the pavement outside Parker Elementary feels like it could be twice as hot. Through the thick and sticky air, Ashley Correia watches her daughter, 6 years old and the youngest of five siblings, drawing with markers and chasing other kids as they blow bubbles nearby. Correia finds refuge in the shade of a pop-up tent, and doesn’t follow her daughter when she zooms into the baking sun.
Correia is a regular here in the summers — has been for years with her other kids — and even remembers getting free summer lunches at the Boys & Girls Club when she was growing up in New Bedford. “Now this is everywhere,” Correia says.
The lunch that Correia’s daughter will eat today — a sandwich, orange, and small carton of chocolate milk — is one of the over 100,000 free meals that will be distributed to New Bedford youth this summer, part of a Summer Eats program that is exploding in popularity. Last summer’s 101,361 meals were a more than 30% increase from the year prior.
Hunger remains a serious problem in New Bedford — partly because it can often go unseen, and partly because it is so hard to solve.
Dozens of kids across New Bedford are showing up to each of the almost 30 sites where New Bedford Public Schools and the parks department are distributing free lunches. Whether they come for the meals, community, or both, there are no questions asked, and kids of all backgrounds are encouraged to participate.
“The cost of food has gone up a ridiculous amount,” Correia says, “but the activities here really help a lot too.” She remarks that there’s not much left for kids to do that’s free. “It’s good [for my daughter] to see other kids rather than being trapped inside all day.”
The logistics behind the operation are immense. About 100 of the school district’s food service workers toil in a cramped basement kitchen, navigate a small fleet of trucks around the city, or manage an even larger network of volunteers who serve the food and set up activities for kids.
And as the operation grows, hiccups are sure to happen.
About a week after Correia and her daughter sat outside Parker Elementary in the scorching heat, the site volunteers found themselves sheltering from the rain under the same tent. They had finished filling about 30 lunch bags and arranged them on the wheeled metal cart, but no children were around.
“I’ll have to throw everything away,” said Maria Morales, a food service worker. “What a shame.”
Morales said the school receives about 100 meals each day to cover the buildings’ two summer programs — a number that meets demand on most days. But when it’s too hot or it rains and kids don’t show up, the food goes in the trash. In the past few weeks, up to half the food was tossed out, said Sharon Rich, manager of the Summer Eats program.
These low-turnout days don’t indicate shrinking demand, but rather the challenges of a city-wide support network. In fact, food insecurity is near the highest it’s ever been. “In Massachusetts, the rate of food insecurity is approaching its May 2020 pandemic peak,” according to Project Bread, the anti-hunger nonprofit that helps coordinate the statewide Summer Eats program. Citing surveys from the census bureau this year, Project Bread reports that 18% of all households in Massachusetts deal with food insecurity.
Yet the picture is worse for families. Among households with children, 23% face food insecurity, and that number is trending upwards.
“It’s sad when people are worried if they’ll eat today,” said Cathy Henriques, the public schools’ assistant director of food services. “No child should be hungry in New Bedford.”
Meals can fight hunger, boost graduations too
The benefits of proper nutrition and free meals are more far-reaching than most people might assume. In fact, nutrition might be “the only silver bullet” in education, says Andrea Silbert, president of the Eos Foundation, a charitable group that has funded school breakfast programs in New Bedford.
But while the Summer Eats program is gaining momentum, participation in school-year programs may have slipped in recent years, according to data from the Eos Foundation. Though all New Bedford students are eligible to receive free breakfast, only 57% do. That lags behind many peer districts like Springfield, Holyoke, and Fall River.
It’s also behind where New Bedford used to be. Silbert helped implement a school breakfast program in New Bedford Public Schools in 2015 and said that former superintendent Pia Durkin made nutrition a signature issue. In only a few years’ time, the district became a consistent, statewide leader in breakfast participation rates, including owning the commonwealth’s outright highest rate in 2018, Silbert said — at over 80%.
That changed during the pandemic, said Rob Shaheen, the district’s director of food services. When in-person school finally resumed, heightened safety measures and tweaks to program operations dampened participation numbers. “It took a few years to get back on track,” Shaheen said, but he predicts that this year participation numbers will rise again.
Research has documented the benefits of such programs, including that kids improve speed and memory in cognitive tests, increase school attendance and punctuality, raise their mood, improve scores on math tests, and become more likely to graduate — all when they simply eat breakfast.
The Eos Foundation collected positive data about New Bedford’s breakfast program too. After facing initial pushback from teachers because students were allowed to take food into morning classes, ultimately 73% of teachers approved of the program after implementation. In surveys, teachers said they “hoped the school would continue to offer the [breakfast] program next year,” and only 6.5% of teachers disagreed.
In those surveys, New Bedford’s teachers said they saw behavior and mood changes: like the 74% of teachers who noticed fewer student trips to the nurse’s office in the morning. And the 24% who noticed other improvements in student behavior that they attributed to the breakfast program.
At the time, the public schools began to see large gains in the district-wide graduation rate. The causal effect of these food programs has largely been unexamined, as the mayor has consistently highlighted this achievement in public remarks, but directed much credit to former superintendent Thomas Anderson, who took over in 2018.
Nutrition alone couldn’t explain all the gains in graduation rates, but districts have other incentives to increase meal participation too. When more students participate in breakfast programs, increased federal grants follow. New Bedford fails to collect nearly $2 million in additional revenue from USDA reimbursements, according to Silbert and the Eos Foundation, because of its lagging breakfast participation.
But Silbert was hopeful. She said, “New Bedford was a leader and they can do it again.”
New central kitchen will feed thousands
Last month, district officials in New Bedford announced that the $4 million project to build a new central kitchen is on track to open in January 2025. It promises to transform how the district feeds its almost 13,000 students — plus students at area schools who depend on the district for their school-year meals.
“It’s really exciting to move our central kitchen out from the basement on County Street to a top notch, beautiful facility,” said Jen Ferland, director of strategic initiatives at New Bedford Public Schools.
At present, one rickety conveyor belt hoists thousands of meals out of a dark basement where staff struggle with outdated and malfunctioning equipment. This current hub for New Bedford’s food operations directly feeds students at 11 schools, and is the logistical center that provides meals to area private and religious schools without sufficient kitchens, like All Saints and St. Francis Xavier.
But the crowded basement also houses office supplies and was temporarily a technology graveyard, where abandoned projectors and desktop computers used to line the hallways.
The new facility at 449 North Street was built using COVID-relief dollars. When it comes online, it will be New Bedford’s answer to feeding thousands of kids every day — for free.
Last year, Massachusetts became the eighth state to pass and fully fund universal, free school meals. The $172 million expenditure represents 0.3% of the statewide budget, but will have far-reaching effects in the commonwealth, as all students attending schools that participate in the National School Lunch and Breakfast programs (most public, charter, and some private schools) receive lunch and breakfast every school day, at no cost.
Cathy Henriques, the assistant director involved with New Bedford’s food services, said that universal programs in Massachusetts solve one of the biggest on-the-ground challenges. “There’s sometimes a stigma that comes with” participating in free meal programs, Henriques said. But she added that it goes away when it’s free for everybody.
The manager of New Bedford’s central kitchen, Lori Almeida, previously told The Light, “We need the right tools to do the job.” The district’s current basement kitchen does not function properly, she said.
But Almeida could already imagine the new kitchen, with separate truck bays and new industrial ovens and kettles. “That’ll be nice,” she said.
Email Colin Hogan at chogan@newbedfordlight.org
No child period, especially in the US should be hungry.