Tigard-Tualatin schools expand summer food service program
Christina Cooke / The Times
BREAKFAST BUDDIES — Sisters Trisha and Aubrey Picknell (from left) eat breakfast at Metzger Elementary on Thursday morning, with roses from their grandmother’s garden in makeshift vases between them. The Tigard-Tualatin School District supplies the meals as part of its federally-funded summer feeding program, newly expanded this year.
TIGARD – Sisters Aubrey and Trisha Picknell sat across from each other at a table in the Metzger Elementary cafeteria Thursday morning, eating hash browns and peach cups and drinking chocolate milk.
“It is sooo good,” Aubrey said. “I love hash browns!”
The Tigard-Tualatin School District expanded its free summer food service program this year to serve almost five times the number of meals it served last year. The program served 5,501 lunches this June and July, compared to 1,147 last year.
“The point of the summer feeding program is to extend the national school lunch program into the summer,” said Diane Wylie, director of food services for the school district. “We know there are kids out there that are hungry and need to eat.”
The federally-funded program, which runs in Tigard and Tualatin from mid-June to mid-August, is open to any person aged 1 to 18 regardless of their economic situation, no application or registration required.
Breakfast menus include items such as french toast, omelettes, hash browns, egg and cheese breakfast wraps, fruit, milk and juice. Lunches include cheeseburgers, bean burritos, tuna sandwiches, chicken egg rolls, fruits and vegetables.
When it started in 2008, the Tigard-Tualatin program offered free lunches at two sites, Metzger Elementary and Bridgeport Elementary. This year, it opened breakfasts to the community at the two school sites and expanded to serve lunches at three apartment complexes as well – Bonita Villa, The Colonies and Olsen Woods.
For a school to qualify for the federal money needed to provide the service, more than half of its regular student population must be eligible for free-and-reduced lunches. For apartment complexes to qualify, residents must meet a similar income requirement.
The Beaverton School District serviced the apartment sites last year while the Tigard-Tualatin program found its legs.
Wylie said she’s grateful that Beaverton was able to feed the apartment residents before Tigard-Tualatin was able, “but they’re in our district, they’re our students, and it makes more sense for the district they live in to feed them.”
In the Metzger Elementary cafeteria on Thursday morning, Janet Robrecht waved good-bye to her 7-year-old son Dylan as he filed away for a summer-school class. Then she waited with her four youngest children as they finished their breakfasts.
“It’s so nice they have this breakfast for the public,” Robrecht said.
She said her children look forward to eating foods they don’t normally get at home.
“Dylan eats more variety here than he does at home,” she said, saying he’ll eat a corndog at Metzger but won’t consider it at his own dinner table. “We don’t do chocolate milk (at home), and juice, we don’t do very often either.”
Because the troubled economy is increasing the number of students who qualify for free-and-reduced lunches, Wylie expects the Tigard-Tualatin summer feeding program to expand even further next year. It will probably serve an additional school and apartment complex, likely 300 to 500 more students per day, she said.
The program, Wylie said, “seems to be working really, really well.”