In the face of a global pandemic, charter schools throughout the state have gone above and beyond to continue serving their students and communities.
Today, we sat down with Amy Burdick, Food Director for North Star Academy in Marquette, Michigan, to learn about how her school has continued to provide essential meals to its students.
What was your reaction when you first learned that students were going to be staying home indefinitely?
My very first reaction was to feel completely overwhelmed to be honest. 60 percent of our student population qualifies for free and reduced lunch—these students absolutely depend on the meal service we provide, so my thoughts immediately went to them. If those students don’t get food from us, they may not eat that meal, and that just isn’t okay. So, I knew we had to come up with a solution, and we had to do it quickly.
That last day of school, we had a team of people clean out the kitchen area and pack up food for each student to take home, ensuring no one would go without while we worked to get some sort of food distribution system in place. Thankfully, by the end of the day, we had an actual plan to work with our busing company to deliver food going forward.
Tell us how that worked?
Well our first instinct was to utilize all our bus stop locations as food drop-off points. And that system worked just fine, but after a few weeks, we realized it was just too costly of a solution. So, we pivoted to having a single pick-up location at the center of each of our 3 bus routes, as well as an additional pick-up site at North Star Academy. We’ve been doing things that way since the end of March and it’s been working great. We plan to continue going on this way with food delivery all the way through June 30, and we also utilize the pickup locations to distribute homework packets to any of our students choosing to do their schoolwork that way.
That sounds like quite the operation. Can you tell more about all the work that goes into getting all that food packaged and delivered?
It’s definitely become a big job to get everything set up and ready to go each week. I go in every Wednesday morning along with our Administrative Assistant, Kristina, and we spend half of the morning getting everything set up for packing on Thursday.
On Thursday mornings, we have some incredible volunteers that come in and get to work packing breakfasts for our students. And just about everyone is chipping in—we’ve had teachers and aides join us, along with the Dean of Students and the Superintendent. Everyone has just been amazing.
We have 5 different stations of food—from the required grains all the way down to milk—that all get packed for each student. And that just covers packing breakfast. We feed at least 130 kids each week, so it’s turned into quite the operation.
On the lunch side of things, we’ve had some incredible help from our food vendor, Lawry’s Pasty Shop. While we’re busy packing breakfasts, Pete Lawry and his staff work hard to pack 5 lunches a piece for each of our students. Once they’re done, our Dean of Students, Dave Gilbert, drives over to Lawry’s Pasty shop to pick up the lunches and bring them back to school.
From there, we have even MORE teacher and aide volunteers who show up and pack up their own cars with food to take to the pick-up sites.
We distribute food every Thursday from 12pm-1pm at all four pick-up sites. And then I keep detailed spreadsheets to keep track of everyone in need of food and those volunteering.
That’s incredible. What precautions are you taking to make sure everyone stays safe while you’re doing this?
We absolutely are taking precautions. We only allow 10 volunteers in the building at a time to help with packaging the food. And everyone wears gloves and masks while packaging and delivering our meals. When this all started, I had masks made for all our volunteers—I wanted to make sure everyone volunteering to help with this felt safe and protected. That was important to me.
Well it sounds like you’re doing amazing work. Thank you so much for taking the time to share with us. Is there anything else you’d like to add?
Thank you. I appreciate that. And I guess I’d just like to add that we’re all working hard to make things feel as “normal” as possible for these kids, and a big part of that is making sure they’re being fed just like they normally would. I’m trying to connect with families via email at least once a week to make sure they’re safe and ask if they need anything. We miss seeing them every day, so it really is nice when they come to food distribution sites to say ‘hello’ from a distance. In fact, I've caught myself crying at times because I miss them so much, just like I’m sure they all miss us. I knew from the beginning we needed to do what we could to make sure they got fed. I would just like to add that I'm so thankful for the State of Michigan and the USDA’s help in this pandemic. They have truly been a blessing to our families as well.