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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Free meals at schools offer summer relief


Elizabeth Halbrook, 5, enjoys her lunch and talks with friends at Rogers. 
 (Jed Conklin / The Spokesman-Review)

Thirteen-year-old Dawn Nielsen walked into Rogers High School with her younger brother and five other fidgeting youths, ages 5 to 10, from her neighborhood.

Like old pros, they politely marched in at 11:54 a.m. Thursday and sat on yellow chairs around a circular lunchroom table. Then they waited for the cafeteria worker to get the afternoon meal ready.

Every day, Spokane Public Schools supplies federally funded lunches and breakfasts to young people at 41 spots around Spokane. The meals are free, and no one has to register or sign up. They merely need to show up like Dawn and the other neighborhood kids.

“It’s just something to do,” Dawn said. “Sometimes we just want to get out of the house.”

This was her first year at Rogers but the second year she has taken advantage of the lunches. A city Parks and Recreation facility that Dawn went to last year for summer meals was shut down, the victim of Spokane budget cuts. Last year, 56 sites offered meals. This year it’s down to 41.

Spokane Public Schools was reimbursed $325,000 for providing about 150,000 meals last year, said Doug Wordell, director of nutrition services. He has tried to land new meal sites like neighborhood community centers, but he’s concerned the number of kids served may go down.

“We’ve been doing the summer meals program for almost 15 years,” Wordell said.

“It’s grown significantly over the last seven years as the parks program and the school district partnered.”

Wordell spoke with a mother at one site who said that the free meal made all the difference to her household, where the money she saved would allow her to buy new shoes for her kids in the fall.

At Rogers, young students like Dawn came to eat, but so did high school students taking summer school and participants in the basketball camp.

Without the free lunches, Michelle Pagel isn’t sure what she would do. Her only income is state assistance, and she is raising five children on her own.

“It helps out a lot,” Pagel said while waiting in her car at Whitman Elementary.

Thirty feet away, about 60 grade-school children sat on the grass outside the school and chatted with each other as they ate taco pockets.

“They look forward to it. All the kids get together and talk a lot. A lot of them are classmates,” Pagel said.

Norma Bellefeuille, a food services worker, whips up a breakfast and two lunches each day at Whitman and Rogers, two schools she attended years ago.

“I just like kids. That’s why I work in the summer. Not everyone likes to work in the summer,” Bellefeuille said.

Every day she knows that when she pulls up, there will be at least 50 hungry children waiting for her to get lunch ready.