Frederica students help pack food with Blessings in a Backpack
Story by Lauren McDonald. Photos by Bobby Haven.
Nearly 2,700 Glynn County students leave school each Friday and do not eat a full meal again until they return on Monday.
But many of their fellow students are not aware of this harsh reality, said Mary Catherine Sexton, who leads the local chapter of Blessings in a Backpack, an organization that works to feed students living in food insecurity.
Every week, Blessings in a Backpack volunteers fill up bags with food to send home with more than 90,000 students across the country.
On Monday, a class of Frederica Academy fourth-graders joined in that effort, packing bags to send home with students in their own community.
“My favorite thing is when we do it with young kids,” said Sexton, the local program coordinator. “I have kids myself, and I don’t know that they really understood that there was a problem. Especially living on St. Simons — it’s such a bubble that you don’t understand what’s going on just across the (F.J. Torras Causeway).”
Every week, the local chapter of Blessings in a Backpack sends food home with around 650 Glynn County students, Sexton said, which meets only one-fourth of the need.
“Can you imagine leaving school on Friday afternoon and not having anything to eat until you come back to school on Monday morning?” said Beth Bush, director of athletic partnerships with Blessings in a Backpack.
In the United States, nearly 16.9 million children suffer from food insecurity, Bush said.
Working efficiently, each student took a plastic bag at the start of the line and went down the table, filling their bag with food items including fruit, milk, soup and granola bars.
In minutes, a large pile of plastics bags had collected at the end of the line, each bag full of food to be sent home this Friday with students at Altama Elementary.
Each time the students handed off a bag, they hurried to the other end of the line to begin again.
“This is hugely beneficial to these kids,” she said. “I heard several of them say, as they were going down the line, ‘I can’t believe this is all they get over the weekend. This would be what I had today at lunch.’”
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