Chicago Public Schools Mobilize to Support Food Insecure Students During the Pandemic

GRAB N GO CPS MEAL DISTRIBUTION DURING THE PANDEMIC

By Lily Levine

2021

A LOOK AT THE EQUITY OF CPS MEAL DISTRIBUTION DURING THE PANDEMIC INSIDE HOW DID STAFF, PARENTS, AND OTHER MEMBERS IN THE CPS COMMUNITY FEEL ABOUT THE SCHOOL DISTRICT'S EFFORTS TO SUPPORT FOOD INSECURE STUDENTS?

Mapping Global Chicago - Spring 2021

GRAB N GO CPS MEAL DISTRIBUTION DURING THE PANDEMIC BACKGROUND

WHAT'S IN THIS ARTICLE

On March 17, 2020, all public schools in Illinois closed in-person instruction. This led to a host of various remote learning challenges, including,but not limited to, digital inequality, decreased student engagement, poorer education quality, a lack of disability support, difficulties with social emotional learning, and greater food insecurity. This last challenge is the focus of my research.

INTRODUCTION: Who does food insecurity affect, how prevalent is it, and where do school meals come in?

After months of remote learning, some students went back to in-person learning in February of 2021. In the current hybrid system, school meals are being in served in school for in-person students as well as to-go for remote students.

CHALLENGES What were the main challenges to equitable food distribution?

SUCCESSES Who benefited, and what did they have to say?

CONCLUSION Why does this research matter, and what are the next steps? *All names have been changed in the article for anonymity.

WRITTEN BY LILY LEVINE EDITED BY STEPHANIE WALLEN ILLUSTRATED BY LILY LEVINE

HI AGO PUBLIC S HOOLS MOBILIZE TO SUPPORT FOOD INSECURE STUDENTS DURING THE PANDEMIC C C C

FIGHTING TIME AND A GLOBAL PANDEMIC, CPS ORGANIZED GRAB N GO SITES FOR ANY FAMILY MEMBER TO PICK UP PRE-PACKAGED FOOD

INTRODUCTION Having completed her weekly shopping at Target after school one day, Ms. Green boarded the “L” home as she normally did. There had been rumblings amongst her fellow teachers that schools might be closing, but it wasn’t until she started talking to a policeman on that train ride that she found out--it was a Friday, and Governor J.B. Pritzker had ordered Chicago schools to close starting Monday.

"Honestly, I was in complete shock that we were closing,” said Ms. Smith, another Chicago Public Schools (CPS) teacher. “I think everything evolved so rapidly and deteriorated so rapidly.

There were so many unknowns at that time. I think it was a quick shock. You’re kind of in solution mode, like ‘How are we going to navigate this?’”

After the initial news broke that all CPS locations were closing March 17th, 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, one of the most critical problems that arose was how the school district could continue to support its students by providing meals. This area of focus is significant, since only 23.9% of students

responded that they ate breakfast on all 7 days, according to the Chicago High School portion of the 2017 Youth Risk Behavior Survey. Additionally, as of the 2020-2021 school year, 63.8% of the student body was classified as economically disadvantaged, revealing the need for the continuation of free or reduced-price meals. With the ability to influence cognitive and behavioral development as well as academic achievement and engagement, food insecurity is a pertinent topic, especially during COVID-19.

Since the National School Lunch Program was established under the National School Lunch Act

by President Harry Truman in 1946, CPS has been providing meals to all eligible students. Serving 75 million meals to over 400,000 students on 665 campuses, CPS has become the third largest K-12 food service in the US. But without in-person classes, the district faced a novel challenge: how could they keep up with the demand for food when students were out of school?

Though national food insecurity rates were steadily declining since the Great Recession, the

pandemic obliterated this progress. Feeding America projects that 42 million Americans, including 13 million children, will experience food insecurity during 2021. Furthermore, COVID-19 exacerbated significant racial disparities, with Feeding America predicting that 21% of Black individuals will experience food insecurity during the year, compared to 11% of white individuals.

“As an educator, I was definitely worried about my teachers, the education that we were going to be providing to our students,” said Ms. Abbott, an Assistant Principal at one school. “But given that we do have a high population of low-income families that rely on meals or on the school for child care, that was definitely a concern, right? So we [tried] to put as many supports in place that will help support those families.”

The Solution

In the weeks following the school closures, CPS Central Office sent out a directive which designated certain schools to become meal distribution sites. The food was available for any CPS family member, and they were allowed to pick up from whichever location was most convenient for them, regardless of where they were enrolled.

The sites provided breakfast and lunch to-go, with foods similar to what CPS would normally serve for field trips. The sites were open from 9am until 1pm every week day. In preparation for holiday closures, families were able to pick up food for multiple days at a time.

Serving over 300,000 students at a time, the CPS Grab N Go sites plan proved to be somewhat revolutionary, and has already received significant attention from researchers across the globe.

McLoughlin et al.’s (2020) study uses demographic data and geographic information systems to identify meal site locations near student populations in order to evaluate the meal distribution strategies of four large urban school districts. Kinsey et al. (2020) calculates the number of weekly and cumulative missed meals between March and April 2020 so as to highlight future strategies to replace the meals. Furthermore, Gupta et al. (2020) assesses food insecurity among families with children using data from the Coronavirus Tracking Survey. While these studies have mainly

examined publicly-available quantitative data to make conclusions about the effectiveness of the Grab N Go sites, the voices of those most intimately connected to the sites, their promotion, and the families who accessed them have not yet been heard.

This article will instead use qualitative methods, in the form of surveys and interviews, to assess the equity of the CPS Grab N Go meal sites during the COVID-19 pandemic. This project attempts to answer the question of how staff, teachers, parents, and other members in the CPS community felt about the school district’s efforts to support food insecure students. This will be evaluated using measures of accessibility, quality, quantity, organization, promotion, and operating hours of the Grab N Go sites. Overall, this data is taken from the 13 survey responses and 4 interviews. The results of these conversations will hopefully inform future strategies to support students and families in times of crisis but also in times of normalcy.

CHALLENGES THE “DIGITAL DIVIDE” IN PROMOTING MEAL SITES

While the “digital divide” has been most commonly discussed in terms of accessibility to Zoom and technology, it can also be seen in the ways in which CPS promoted their meal distribution sites.

According to the survey, 76.9% of people said their school communicated information about food distribution through email. 53.8% said the school used a newsletter, while 46.2% said they used social media. Other forms of communication included reaching out to families directly, radio or TV ads, physical or digital signage, the school announcement boards, and school district websites. Figure 1 illustrates these results.

How Did Your School Promote Food Distribution?

and she acknowledged that this would pose a challenge to promoting the resource. For the future, she suggested robocalling families, which is an automated phone call used to disseminate announcements.

STAFFING

Fig. 1

When considering the effectiveness of these promotional types, survey participants for the most part found the efforts useful. On a scale from 1 to 5, with 1 being “not effective at all” and 5 being “extremely effective,” 53.8% of respondents rated the promotions as a 4 while 30.8% rated them as a 5. Only 7.7% rated them as a 2 and a 3. In explaining their answers, about three-fourths of the respondents said that the public was made aware of the meal sites and that the information was readily available. The other quarter felt that there could have been more done, such as reaching out to people that do not have email. Additionally, they felt that some families did not take advantage of the free meals.

Ms. Abbott believed the program promotions were mostly successful, but she offered informed suggestions in the interview. At Ms. Abbott’s school, the distribution table was right outside the door, and a flag was posted on campus to advertise the free meals. However, she said one improvement her school could have made was to create more promotional materials that were not technologydependent.

“As a school, we do a lot on our website...I know CPS sends items [through] social media, but I also wonder if an extra step could have been taken for our families that might not be tech savvy, or have technology readily available, to promote the sites that were providing meals. So even wondering about a commercial or some poster boards...just thinking about our families that might have limited resources in terms of technology or even internet access...How are we reaching those families?”

Ms. Green was surprised to learn that many of her students did not have computers at home,

Issues with staffing were also present, due to disorganization and lack of communication during the pandemic. One survey respondent wrote that food distribution did not seem like a priority.

Assistant Principal Abbott described how a lack of social distancing among the lunchroom staff in the fall led to safety and health concerns. Because CPS hires a third-party company for meal distribution, various miscommunication may have contributed to the outbreak.

“We had a very unique situation here where unfortunately, the adults that do meal distribution were not necessarily social distancing the way they should,” she said. “So we did have a COVID case, which caused the entire lunchroom staff to quarantine for 14 days--they had to shut us down [as] a meal site for 14 days. [That’s] a lot, especially for the families that are relying on meal distribution.

So that just took some more [coordination] on our end with our counselor to make sure that the families that we had identified as high-need were provided for during that time with options of other meal sites that they could go and pick up.”

CPS grandparent Mrs. Godwin heard about the meal distribution from other parents that lived in the area. While she was grateful for the service and appreciated its increasingly organized format, she felt that the staff did not always do their job. This made the experience less enjoyable, and it also made the system disorderly.

“I hate to say this. [For] a lot of those people, the meal distribution brought them back to work. And so a lot of them weren't happy, because they were at home collecting compensation without doing anything, and now they'd have to come, or be at the school to distribute the meals. And sometimes [families] were coming, sometimes [families] weren't coming, and I heard [the staff] complaining a lot that people were taking the meals, and they didn't know that they were gone.

"EVERY TIME I WENT FOR FOOD, NO ONE WAS AT THE FOOD TABLE THEY HAD PUT OUTDOORS. DIDN’T KNOW HOW TO GET THE FOOD. IT WASN’T WHERE THEY SAID IT WOULD BE." - RESPONSE FROM THE "FOOD DISTRIBUTION DURING COVID-19" SURVEY

FOOD QUALITY

Grab N Go sites provided breakfast and lunch that any CPS family member aged 18-years and older could pick up on alternating days. Per the USDA national nutrition guidelines, reimbursable meals must contain at least 3 of the 5 food groups: protein, grain, vegetable, fruit, and milk.

Furthermore, meals must include at least one serving of a fruit or vegetable. For the month of May, 2021, for example, meal distribution kits included food items like apple slices, milk, corn chex, banana bread with a hard-boiled egg, french toast sticks, beef sausage on a honey corn biscuit, and more.

Having worked in the food industry and in the school lunch program herself, Mrs. Godwin knew how multifaceted food distribution can be. Though the meals followed nutritional guidelines, she recalled that they were pre-packed and not always fresh.

“When it comes from the central location, sometimes the milk is froze, the juice’s froze. So you're having to give them frozen juice, frozen milk.

Sometimes when we get vegetables on Friday, and when you open it, it would just be water. So the rotation of the food needed to be monitored more.”

Though it is expected that to-go food would be of a lower caliber than in-person hot food, the meal quality speaks to the organization and prioritization of the sites.

SUCCESSES In general, most of the research participants believed that anyone who needed food could have gotten it. The positive feedback is evidence of CPS’s successful efforts in helping to alleviate food

On a scale from 1 to 5, with 1 being “not equitable” and 5 being “extremely equitable,” 69.3% of survey respondents rated the food distribution a 4 or 5.

One respondent wrote, “All Chicago Public students had a location where they could receive food.” This indicates that CPS was able to make food available to its community.

In General, How Equitable Were the Meal Sites?

Number of Survey Respondents

Well if you had been at the table, or you had been at the door when the person came, you would have known.”

One survey response echoed this sentiment.

When asked what the school succeeded at in terms of providing food to students who needed it during the pandemic, one person wrote, “Every time I went for food, no one was at the food table they had put outdoors. Didn’t know how to get the food. It wasn’t where they said it would be.”

Therefore, a lack of attentiveness to the tables formed one barrier to accessing the food.

Scale from 1 to 5 Fig.2 - Meal site equity rated on a scale from 1 to 5 with 1 being "not equitable at all" and 5 being "extremely equitable

On a scale from 1 to 5, with 1 being “not equitable” and 5 being “extremely equitable,” 69.3% of survey respondents rated the food distribution a 4 or 5. One respondent wrote, “All Chicago Public students had a location where they could receive food.” This indicates that CPS was able to make food available to its community.

“It was pretty seamless,” said Ms. Smith on CPS’s ability to assemble quickly. “Like I want to say that as soon as schools closed, the meal centers were open. They didn't really miss a beat on that. But I think what made it really helpful was you didn't have to go to [the] school that you attend--you go to whatever the closest school is. So that helped with access, I think, because not all of our students live in this area or can walk to school; some of them are traveling really far away.”

In terms of supporting its families, the Grab N Go sites were able to alleviate both the financial and parental burden of having to provide every meal for their child.

“As you know, many people lost their jobs, or their jobs were put on hold,” said Assistant Principal Abbott. “You know, we have a lot of [parents that are] essential workers, including restaurant servers.

So I think having the option to come and pick up a meal definitely supported the families then, in a way that wasn't an added thing for them to worry about. Like now they have to worry about rent, bills, things like that. But if the need for a meal is there, they can easily come to the school and get that.”

“MOST WHITE KIDS DIDN'T HAVE TO HAVE [FREE SCHOOL MEALS], WHEREAS A LOT MORE BROWN AND BLACK KIDS DID. DISPARITY IS THE FACT OF LIFE, YOU KNOW...IT’S STILL THE SAME. ” - MS. GREEN

Ms. Smith agreed that the resource was invaluable and helped to support her community.

“I know that there were lots of families who relied on that and rely on it every day as well, you know, when they send their children to school. So, I think the fact that it was like, ‘This is something we're gonna provide immediately.’ There was never any question about it. This is something that the district did pretty well and very efficiently.”

With the goal of reducing the number of hungry children during the pandemic, Ms. Green believed CPS succeeded in supporting its community and even raised greater awareness of the issue of food insecurity.

“Being a teacher, you know, with me having so many things on my mind and stuff, I never really think [that] some kids would have starved into dinner or [that] there is food deprivation at their home.”

The overall positive responses, both in surveys and interviews, reveal that the Grab N Go sites responded quickly and provided an important food source for its families. On top of feeding hungry students, the food also alleviated parents’ stress and was, for the most part, a dependable resource.

CONCLUSION: VALUE OF SCHOOL MEALS The value of school meals is undeniable. They help to reduce food insecurity, improve access to nutritious foods, positively impact health, and improve nutrition, thus leading to a better learning environment. Most importantly, they have the potential to increase socioeconomic and racial equality.

Economic Benefit

To Mrs. Godwin, school meals are a way that institutions can economically support their families outside the classroom setting.

“I think it's important that they continue to provide [the meals] because not all children are able to afford to bring their own lunches,” she said.

“All parents, all families aren’t able to provide it.

Even though some of the families may be receiving food stamps or whatever, they just aren't able to make ends meet at this time. And [school meals are] a source, you know, to make sure that the kids are getting some type of balanced nutrition.”

Aids in Reducing Racial Disparities

School meals also offer a window into looking at racial disparities rooted in institutional racism and discrimination. Ms. Green observed that school meals have historically, and are currently, disproportionately utilized by students of color.

“Most white kids didn't have to have [free school meals], whereas a lot more Brown and Black kids did. Disparity is the fact of life, you know...It’s still the same. Not saying that white kids aren't [utilizing school meals], right? But the numbers [are] not as great as the Brown and Black kids.”

Reflecting on COVID-19 as a whole, Ms. Smith believed the pandemic brought to light systemic inequalities that have been present in the U.S. for years.

“I think that it has definitely showed us that there were a lot of holes in our system that [were] designed for people who don't look like me to fail.

We're seeing a lot of issues with racism, with authority, with some people making no money and losing their jobs and other people making billions in a day. This pandemic set us up for a huge civil rights movement that always existed. But now people are starting to tune into it finally, which I hope is a catalyst for change.”

Overall, the survey responses reveal that CPS acted quickly to provide children with sufficient food that still adhered to nutritional guidelines.

Taking holidays, geographic distance, and public health into account, the staff, administration, and food service team worked hard to make the distribution sites as dependable as possible.

However, due to the immense shock and quick speed of the pandemic, challenges were inevitable.

These included a lack of technology and internet access when receiving logistical information, poor communication amongst food workers leading to COVID-19 outbreaks, and inconsistent food quality.

In the future, steps should be taken to make sure that all groups in society can equally access the food to meet their individual needs. One way to do this is to promote the meal sites using nontechnological methods so as to reach families that do not own devices or that lack wifi. Also, communication should be improved to ensure that meal distribution is organized and presented as a top priority. Lastly, food leaving the Central Office should be inspected before being served. These adjustments will enable more families to pick up food and improve the equity of the meal distribution system as a whole.

“For [the students that know their families are struggling], to know that they can have breakfast and lunch at school is definitely [going to] alleviate whatever the circumstances may be at home,” said Ms. Abbott.

Despite the immense challenges of the pandemic, CPS can rest assured that it served its community in a time of need. As students return to in-person classes and school meals resume as normal, however, it is imperative that the issue of food insecurity remains visible and that actions to combat it stay vigilant.

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Kinsey, Eliza W. "School Closures during COVID19: Opportunities for Innovation in Meal Service." American Journal of Public Health110, no. 11 (November 1, 2020): 1635-43. https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10.210 5/AJPH.2020.305875.

McLoughlin, Gabriella M. "Addressing Food Insecurity through a Health Equity Lens: a Case Study of Large Urban School Districts during the COVID-19 Pandemic." Journal of Urban Health, September 21, 2020, 759-75. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11524020-00476-0.

Office of Student Health and Wellness.

"Understanding School Food." Chicago Public Schools. Accessed May 30, 2021. https://www.cps.edu/globalassets/cpspages/services-and-supports/health-andwellness/healthy-cps/healthyenvironment/school-food/dinewellunderstanding-school-food.pdf.

World Economic Forum. COVID-19 Exposed the Digital Divide. Here's How We Can Close It. Last modified January 27, 2021. Accessed May 30, 2021. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/01/covi d-digital-divide-learning-education/.