MLSD hands out meals for kids

MOSES LAKE — They gathered outside seven elementary schools across the Moses Lake School District, with school buses carrying plastic crates full of sack lunches, cartons of milk and juice, ready to give out to children across Moses Lake.

“We are here handing out lunches to kids zero to 18,” said Kimberly Levi, head cook and food service manager at Frontier Middle School. “We prepped a bunch of food yesterday, and we’re just waiting on kids to show up.”

Levi was one of several Moses Lake School District employees handing out meals to kids and families at Midway Elementary School on Friday, the first day of what the district says will be a month of free meal handouts expected to last until April 24, the extent of Gov. Jay Inslee’s school closure order.

The school district will give out the meals, which contain both lunch and breakfast for the following day, every weekday — except April 6-10 — from 10:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. at Knolls Vista, Lakeview, Larson Heights, Longview, Midway, North and Peninsula elementary schools. The measure is a way of helping the many families who qualify for free or reduced-price school breakfast and lunch cope with the shutdowns ordered by public officials in response to the COVID-19 virus.

Each school got 200 sacks containing lunch and breakfast, Levi said. It was a guess, and the number will be adjusted as the district learns where the demand for the meals is.

After governors ordered schools closed across the country, school districts are struggling to provide meals to students who qualify for the federal school breakfast and lunch programs. A family of four making less than $34,060 per year (130 percent of the federal poverty line) can qualify for the free lunch program, while the same family making less than $48,470 per year (185 percent of the federal poverty line) can qualify for reduced-price school meals, according to poverty guidelines from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

In Moses Lake, 51 percent of the district’s 8,597 students enrolled as of Oct. 31, 2019, qualify for free school meals, while 11 percent qualify for reduced meals, according to data from the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction.

And they came — in cars and on foot, parents bringing kids and the occasional child walking or biking in alone.

“This is a good thing,” one parent said. “A lot of people need this.”

Midway Principal John Farley was also out there, making sure everything was going well and that everyone — staffers and children — was safe.

“I’m waving to the kids to show them that we are still here and that we care about them,” Farley said.

Farley said he was also impressed with the bus drivers and food service workers who had made and distributed the lunches.

“They’ve done an amazing job,” he said. “It’s all about these guys today.”

Over at Peninsula Elementary, school nurse Liz Pray was also handing out toothbrushes and toothpaste along with the sacks of breakfast and lunch — part of the school’s regular dental health presentations that Pray said she’d forgotten about in all the preparations for the closure.

While the folks at Midway had only handed out about 30 bags, Pray said Midway had given away nearly half of its 200 meals.

“We were really busy at the beginning,” she said. “We had some kids ride their bikes over, some walked, some came with parents. We didn’t anticipate the kids riding their bikes, and should have advised them to bring backpacks.”

Charles H. Featherstone can be reached at cfeatherstone@columbiabasinherald.com.