Kara Phillips waited in line for food on a Tuesday morning, just as she had done last summer.
The sun beamed down on her and her children at Panther Valley Football Stadium in Lansford. She grabbed a few bags of food and walked away. Phillips would be back next week.
The site prepares 600 bags of free food for each distribution day.
As summer drags on, some families in Pennsylvania must rely on the Summer Food Service Program (SFSP), part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Summer Nutrition Program. The federally-funded initiative helps provide food for students who rely on school meals as their primary source of nutrition.
The Pennsylvania Department of Education (PDE) operates the SFSP at a state level. Last year, more than 4 million meals were served to students during the summer.
Food insecurity is a growing concern in Pennsylvania. Feeding Pennsylvania, the state-based association of Feeding America, said in May that over 1.5 million Pennsylvanians face food insecurity — defined by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as the lack of access to enough food for an active, healthy life.
Increased meal prices have resulted in the cost of food security being at its highest point in the last 20 years.
“When kids are in school, they get breakfast, they get lunch. During the summer, they don’t. So the fact that kids are home from school… parents or caregivers or grandparents have to purchase that extra food… it just puts an added strain on the budget of those households,” said Jennifer Warabak, the Executive Director of the Commission on Economic Opportunity.
At Weinberg Northeast Regional Food Bank in Pittston, one of nine Feeding Pennsylvania-affiliated food banks, Warabak said that food insecurity, especially in rural areas, is a growing concern.
“(In rural areas), you don’t have a grocery store on every corner. There’s a lot of extra details that need to go into ensuring that someone can get from where their home is to where they can get food,” she said.
To help combat that issue, Vonda Ramp, the State Director of the Child Nutrition Program for PDE, says that select locations in rural areas provide non-congregate meals, more commonly known as meals to-go. These locations give families the option to pick up meals on-site, rather than the usual stay-and-eat policy in more urban areas. This feature is new, Ramp said, and was a byproduct of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Ramp outlined the benefits of a more relaxed system for rural areas. She highlighted how the strain of travel for some families is made easier by receiving multiple take-home meals.
“The wonderful thing about non-congregate meals is that those meal service sites can provide multiple days worth of meals at one time, unlike a congregate meal setting where the child has to come to the site and stay at the site to eat their meal… children can receive multiple days worth of meals to take home, and that's especially beneficial in rural areas of the state where they might have to travel further to get a meal,” she said.
Of the more than 2,000 SFSP locations across Pennsylvania, only 136 are designated as non-congregate.
“We would love to see that number grow in future summers, but until then, that's where the bundling of the meals really becomes beneficial for families,” Ramp said.
The Panther Valley Football Stadium is one of these meals to-go locations. Home to one of the most impoverished school districts in the state, around 80% of families in the district receive some form of assistance according to Robert Palazzo, Panther Valley’s Supervisor of Curriculum, Student, and Community Services.
In June, more than 16,000 meals were given to families in the school district. Palazzo said that the advantage of a to-go site is the amount of food families receive.
“It allows us to distribute the food to the families and allows them to bring those home over and eat them over the course of the week. There's two distribution days — Tuesdays and Thursdays — and over the course of those days, they get meals for all seven days,” he said.
At the distribution site, a line of families stretched past the stadium gates, including Phillips and her children. Some kids came on their own, taking as many bags and containers of milk as they could carry before trotting off.
Phillips said her family has taken advantage of the summer food program for two years, citing rising food costs as a major financial strain.
“(The price of) food is really high right now. So this is very helpful, you know, for our family, and our neighbors, too — everyone in our community has been taking advantage of this program,” she said.
To Phillips, what matters most is young students getting needed nutrition.
“I think (it’s important) that the children are taken care of,” Philips said. “A lot of people are having trouble managing with the higher rents and the cost of the utilities, so I think the most important thing is that the children are taken care of.”
To find a Summer Food Service Program site near you:
Call 211, 1-866-3-Hungry, or 1-877-8-Hambre.
Text "Summer" or "VERANO" to 914-342-7744.
Download the Range app to your mobile device.
Visit fns.usda.gov/meals4kids – meal sites are added and removed throughout the summer, so check the webpage often to ensure you have the most up-to-date information.