You’re a mom raising two kids on your own, as your husband is temporarily out of town looking for work. You used to have a job working on a factory production line, but a car accident just a few minutes away from home left you injured and unable to work.
That was several months ago.
You’ve been able to struggle on by, thanks to a stroke of luck in finding a somewhat affordable place to rent in New Westminster and some help from your kids’ schools, where breakfast and lunch programs have helped to take some of the strain off your grocery bills.
Then the COVID-19 pandemic hits.
Now your kids are home with you, and you’re faced with trying to figure out how to navigate the world of online learning when you don’t know anything about computers yourself – and, on top of all of that, you have to figure out where the grocery money is coming from.
That’s the story – or part of it, anyway – for one New Westminster mom who’s taking part in a New Westminster School District lunch program that launched last week to help keep families fed through the pandemic.
Today is Monday, April 20, and Eloise (not her real name) has just come back from New Westminster Secondary School, where she now goes daily to pick up lunches for her two children. They’re among the daily meals that are being prepared for about 100 kids in New Westminster.
Staff at NWSS have stepped in to prepare the lunches using the school kitchens, and education assistants are on hand to act as guides to allow safe entry into the school.The district is also working on ways to deliver food to families who may not be able to get to NWSS for pickup.
Eloise, and other parents, can log in ahead of time and choose their children’s offerings from a varied menu for the month ahead.
The variety has been great, she says, with different meat and vegetable options – and enough food that her kids like. Today, they had a bagel with cream cheese, plus yogurt, fruit and juice.
The program is an extension of the school district’s Fuel Up program, a subsidized lunch program that helps ensure kids from families in need have enough food throughout the school week.
Once the pandemic hit and in-class instruction was suspended, the school district reached out to families about their needs with a survey at the end of March. Other families made direct contact with their school principals to ask for help.
For Eloise, it was her children’s schools who made contact with her – her son is at Fraser River Middle School, and her daughter attends Lord Kelvin Elementary School. The schools knew her, she noted, because she had already needed to turn to them for help earlier in the school year. The start of the new school year in 2019 had come soon after her accident, and she didn’t have enough money to get school supplies for her kids.
They helped her then, she says with gratitude – and they reached out to her earlier this month to offer her the lunch program too.
“It’s a really big help,” she says. “Whatever money I’m getting, I just save it for the rent and utilities and other bills. This is a really big help.”
It also eases some of the stress for Eloise, who notes that the whole world of online learning is new to her.
“In my country, we do (it) all through paper and books; we don’t have computers,” she said. “I don’t really know how to do the computer; I only open my laptop for online banking, just to pay the bills.”
But with an old laptop and two phones (hers and her son's), they’re figuring out how to make it work. And, at least with food now taken care of, she has less anxiety about money.
“It’s really, really helpful for some of the families like me,” she said.
Superintendent Karim Hachlaf said the district wanted to build on its Fuel Up program to make sure families in need of continued or extra support through the pandemic could get it.
“New West is a diverse community, and we’ve always been aware of the range of needs the kids here face daily,” he said in an email. “If kids don’t eat, they can’t learn … whether that’s happening at schools or at home. And families are facing enough pressures and stress right now. So, if we can help be part of a solution that supports our students and their families, it benefits everybody to provide a bit of stability through this uncertain time.”
The lunch program has come together quickly since the district pulled together the data from the family survey it sent out March 27. It took a week to analyze and pull together the data and another week to build the plan. Food ordering and prep started at the beginning of last week, with the first lunches distributed to families on April 16.
The service has been built with an emphasis on health and safety; people picking up lunches each day have a scheduled time to arrive so that staff can stage entries into the school and ensure safe social distancing.
Hachlaf said the district is proud of the employees across the district who have stepped up throughout the COVID-19 outbreak.
“The team helping deliver this lunch program shows us another great example of the flexibility, caring and dedication our staff are employing,” he said. “It’s a sense of commitment to community that exemplifies the fact that we really are in this together.”
Any families who need lunch support for their children through the COVID-19 crisis can contact their school principal directly. For more on the school district’s COVID-19 efforts, see https://newwestschools.ca/covid-19-info-centre/
