EDITORIAL: Summer meals program fills a community need

Published 11:23 am Monday, June 3, 2019

Beginning next week, free meals will once again be delivered to area young people, thanks to the Baldwin County School District’s summer meal program. 

The Seamless Summer Option, as formally titled by the United States Department of Agriculture, runs Mondays through Fridays through July 18, providing breakfast and lunch free of charge to children from birth to 18 years old. 

For the past several years this program has served up thousands of meals to area young people, a benefit to the whole community. 

When school lets out for the summer, this program ensures that just because classes are over doesn’t mean that local young people go lacking at breakfast and lunchtime. 

Over each of the last two summers around 47,000 meals have been served to the community through the Seamless Summer Option, ensuring that local young people get at least two healthy, balanced meals a day. 

Young people not only get at least one good meal a day, but the service also gets them out of the house and they interact as they play while the meals are being prepared and then get to eat together.

Parents benefit too, especially those who often have to choose whether to buy food or pay the power bill.

School lunch and breakfast programs were born of the realization that proper nutrition is not only important for children’s health but also vital to their ability to learn. It’s hard to sit in class and learn when all you can think about is how hungry you are, and depriving youths of proper nutrition in the summer sets them up for academic failure once school starts.

Although children living in poverty are part of the focus, local young people are fed regardless of their family income. 

Children can obtain meals through a number of ways. They can either come to the meals or the meals can come to them. Two bus routes will run throughout the community stopping in areas highly concentrated with children like apartment complexes and neighborhoods.

A full list of open summer meal sites and mobile bus route stops is available on the Baldwin County School District’s website at www.baldwincountyschoolsga.org.