Summer is here, and for the students of Kalispell’s School District 5, it means a couple of months of freedom outside of the classroom.
Still, for many students, it also means losing a vital support system when it comes to mealtime.
“Many of the 6,000 students in Kalispell District 5 rely on our free and reduced school food program for half of their daily calories,” Jessica Manly, FoodCorps service member at SD5, said. “Often, those kids don’t have a way to get a healthy meal in the summer.”
But the meals don’t stop just because classes do. Kalispell’s school system offers a free summer meals program, providing healthy breakfasts and lunches for any child up to 18 years old, no questions asked.
The ingredients are as locally sourced as possible, Manly said, with Montana milk, vegetables, fruits, and meat used to supplement the meals.
“We are really pushing to make it a really nutritious, delicious meal and we do a lot of local purchasing,” she said.
And this summer, with a recently acquired $25,000 grant from the National Parks and Recreation Association, the summer meals program will expand to include more physical activities, games, and gardening in the schools’ ongoing garden programs.
Most of the school gardens are used for education purposes, letting kids get in touch with where their food comes from and showing them the beautiful simplicity of a plant coming from a seed.
The school district’s central kitchen has a working garden, however, and Manly said it is already producing enough greens to serve all the salad bars at the elementary schools a couple of times. That garden will produce vegetables for the summer meals program, making them not only local, but extremely fresh.
The meals begin on Monday, June 15, and will be served at Elrod Elementary, Russell Elementary, and Woodland Park, Monday through Friday. In July, a site at the Flathead County Fairgrounds will also serve lunch.
The Elrod and Woodland Park locations serve both breakfast and lunch, while the Russell site only serves lunch. Elrod breakfast is from 8 a.m. to 9 a.m., and lunch from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m.
Woodland Park serves breakfast from 8:30 a.m. to 9:30 a.m., and lunch from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. Russell lunch begins at 11:30 a.m. and ends at 1 p.m.
On June 19, the program will host a kickoff barbecue at Woodland Park, including local food, Kalispell Fire Department trucks, face painting, games, Zumba, and more.