new & notable Piney Orchard Elementary Cafeteria Manager Freda Taylor-Chapman serving meals in May 2020.
5 Million Meals AACPS’ School Meals Team Remains Dedicated to Feeding Kids
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hen Maryland State School Superintendent Dr. Karen Salmon and Governor Larry Hogan announced on Thursday, March 12, 2020, that schools were going to close for two weeks due to the COVID-19 pandemic, parents wondered what they were going to do about child care or how to entertain school-aged children at home without resorting to an overdose of screentime. Others, however, had a more pressing question: Without going to school, how will my children eat? That question was also on the mind
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of Jodi Risse, MS, RD, LDN, Food and Nutrition Services Supervisor for Anne Arundel County Public Schools (AACPS), who knew that many students relied on school breakfast and lunch as a primary source of food. To avoid a lapse in meal service, Risse and her team sprung into action, transitioning from operating under the regulations of the National School Lunch Program (NSLP), to the Summer Food Service Program (SFSP), another federal program that allows schools to provide meals when schools aren’t in session. “We went home on a Thursday, saying we were going to offer lunch and snack.
We came back on Monday and started offering three meals,” said Risse during a conversation that occurred in April 2020, when the world was just one month into the pandemic. “Numerous conversations happened that weekend with superintendents, as well as staff in the schools, wondering why we can’t offer more meals. . . . The first few weeks were really hectic. You had to put all of the pieces of the puzzle together.” The Food and Nutrition Services team was ahead of the game, having already developed the menu they planned to implement during summer 2020; however, it took a significant amount of coordination with food and equipment vendors to ensure that they had everything they needed “before we lost it to another district or institution,” Risse said in 2020. On the first day of emergency curbside feeding, AACPS served 3,385 meals; in week one, more than 10,000 meals. By mid-April, they had provided more than 570,000 meals to nearly 200,000 students in the county. As the months—and the pandemic— went on, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees all school meal programs, gradually issued waivers to existing regulations surrounding school meals, which allowed school nutrition professionals across the country to make it easier to get food to children. One of those waivers allowed for the meals to be provided at no charge for all of America’s children through the end of the 2020–2021 school year; another relaxed the requirement that a certain percentage of area students had to receive free or reduced-price meals in order to open an emergency feeding location, which allowed AACPS to expand distribution to nearly all of their schools in September 2020. At the same time, however, parents wondered if they should take advantage of these free meals, a concern buoyed
