According to a new survey completed by provincial principals, Alberta’s teachers and schools are finding their own solutions to solve student food insecurity and hunger in the classroom.
The study was sponsored by Growing Food Security in Alberta Network, Promoting Optimal Weights through Ecological Research and the Alberta Policy Coalition for Chronic Disease Prevention. It found that teachers carried most of the burden for feeding students who show up at school without eating proper meals at home.
Principals reported that 62 per cent of teachers were offering emergency food to students and school food banks were feeding students 20 per cent of the time. Forty per cent of schools have found ‘other’ solutions to feeding hungry students in their classrooms.
Suzan Krecsy, executive director of the St. Albert Food Bank said it is very common for teachers to feed students
“I’ve heard about that for years,” Krecsy said. “They’re spending quite a bit of their own money on it.”
On top of support from the teachers, the St. Albert Food Bank offers support to eight local schools to help them provide students with emergency food.
“Anything that we can do to make sure kids are properly fed in order to learn is good,” Krecsy said.
The St. Albert Food Bank, along with many provincial food banks, supplies schools with a pantry to draw from when students have missed a meal or suffer from long-term food insecurity. The local food bank stocks the school pantries with granola bars, cereal, bread and juice boxes and they also work closely with school to help families who rely on the school pantries.
Other schools in the area have got creative about feeding their hungry students. The faculty of the Morinville Community High School has pioneered their own hot-lunch program.
“We have got a couple of our staff and every morning they put on a crock pot and in it there are soups, stews, pasta and so on,” Todd Eistetter, principal of Morinville Community High School said. “They get a hot lunch, some fruit, a drink or a salad, so it’s a balanced meal.”
The program was born in September 2011 and initially the cost came out of the school’s budget. Now it is supported by donations from the community and is able to feed 12-15 kids each day.
Overall, the study concluded that schools across Alberta have already taken significant steps to create healthy food environments but more still needs to be done.
The survey spanned 54 school boards and included the results from 363 principals from public, separate and francophone schools across Alberta.
