AUBURN — A couple of times a month, Doreen Morin’s daughter brings home food from school.

The fruit cups, oatmeal, spaghetti and canned goods help feed the family of six. So does the soup and other food a school police officer drops off once in a while.

With no car, no job, living in a hotel room, Morin, her husband and their four teenage girls rely on that extra food.

“The kids, it gives them something to eat,” Morin said. “I would definitely struggle at times with food for the kids. I would never let them go without, but I would struggle.”

The food, picked up by Morin’s daughter or a school police officer, comes from Edward Little High School, where a converted storage room houses shelves of raisins, peanut butter, cereal, canned vegetables, tuna and crackers. 

The school’s own food pantry.

Hungry Auburn students regularly use the pantry — grabbing a snack during school, getting something for lunch, taking food to bring home. In the two-and-a-half years since it opened, the pantry has become a fixture in the school.

“I don’t know how we functioned without it before,” said Assistant Principal Jim Horn, who helps run the pantry.

Once limited to church basements, shelters and community centers, food pantries have become increasingly popular among schools. Since it started offering a school pantry program in 2013, the Good Shepherd Food-Bank in Auburn has helped nearly 60 get started.

There are drawbacks. Schools have to find a place to put a pantry. Someone there has to take on the added work of coordinating the program. And the food, even from the food bank, costs money. 

But schools — and families — say it’s well worth it.

“If (kids) are thinking about being hungry, their minds aren’t on school,” Horn said. “I don’t see how anybody could focus on an empty stomach.”

‘If they want something to eat, they get something to eat’

Samantha Culver suggested school food pantries to Good Shepherd leaders a few years ago.

A member of Feeding America’s Child Hunger Corps, she’d agreed to spend two years helping out at Good Shepherd. Her first assignment: assess the food needs of communities in Maine. 

“The toughest part about it was it really varied depending on where we were looking. That’s just the nature of Maine as a state. In Portland, Auburn, Lewiston, in the more urban areas, there was a very different need than in Aroostook (County) and a lot of the rural areas,” she said.

Urban areas offered help, Culver found, but those resources were overwhelmed. In rural communities, hungry families often didn’t have resources at all.

“It was kind of frustrating,” Culver said of the rural areas. “It was all there. The farmland and everything is right around these schools. If you’re driving through, you pass these farms, but you get to the school and . . . the biggest need is fresh food.”

Good Shepherd already ran a backpack program, providing food that schools would send home with hungry children on weekends. But the program didn’t work well in some schools, including those with very high poverty rates — the need was too great to be relieved by some backpacks of food once a week.

Culver suggested creating school food pantries. Feeding America runs a school pantry program that serves nearly 110,000 children nationwide and Good Shepherd, as a Feeding America member, could use that program as a template, she said.

Good Shepherd leaders agreed. Using Culver’s research, the food bank’s staff prioritized the neediest communities and offered to help them set up a school pantry.

“If we wanted to start food pantries, where are we going to start?” said Kristen Miale, president of Good Shepherd, recalling the beginnings of the program. “If you ask who needs one, everybody’s going to raise their hand, unfortunately, because the need is so great here.”

Portland High School’s Key Club members had been talking about starting a food pantry. It became the first one to get Good Shepherd’s help. After that, the East End Community School in Portland opened a pantry.

“Then it just spread faster,” said Culver, who now lives in Vermont and is planning to become a pediatrician after studying child poverty and hunger in Maine.

Edward Little was among that first group of Maine schools to start a pantry under the program. It opened in spring 2013.

Although little advertised, the pantry is popular. Teachers and administrators give out at least 1,000 pantry-supplied snacks to hungry students every month. A couple of times they’ve hit the 2,000-snack mark.

Kids can go to the pantry, too, to get lunch, food to eat after school or meals for their family. Designed to be anonymous and nonjudgmental, the pantry program tracks how much food is given out but not which students get it, why they want it or whether their parents should be able to go to the grocery store instead.

“If they want something to eat, they get something to eat,” Horn said.

Fifty-eight schools in Maine now have food pantries on-site, with more school officials considering it. They’re a mix of urban and rural schools, high schools and elementary schools.

Each pantry is run slightly differently. Some allow children to take food directly from the shelves, while others pack it up in bags. Some focus largely on nonperishable foods, while others offer fresh produce as often as possible. Some open in the summer, while others are school-year only.

But they all have one thing in common: They have a large percentage of students who would probably go hungry without help.

“A lot of kids are hungry,” said Farrah Poirier, an art teacher at Livermore Elementary School. “Especially the younger kids, they’ll tell you they’re hungry. They’ll come in on Monday and tell you that they didn’t have any dinner the night before or all they had were apples over the weekend.

She reached out to Good Shepherd after reading a news story about a backpack program at another school.

“I thought, ‘We have a lot of kids who are hungry,'” she said. “If Lewiston can do it, why can’t we?”

Schools gauge poverty by the number of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch. In Maine, just under 47 percent of children are eligible, according to the latest Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Kids Count data.

At Livermore Elementary, 65 percent are eligible.

The food bank suggested the school host a full pantry. Its poverty rate was just too high — and the need likely too great — for backpacks.

Poirier, her principal and superintendent were intrigued. With Good Shepherd’s help, they set up a pantry in a spare room and began sending food home with any student who needed it.

“Teachers were (telling) their kids, ‘If you’re worried about food, we’ve got the food pantry. So if you need some food, we can go down and get some, just let me know. You can tell me privately or you can tell me right now,'” Poirier said. “Hands were shooting up.”

The pantry’s first order was supposed to last a month. It lasted about a week.

The school has about 420 students. Poirier estimates the pantry serves 60 families each week.

“At the very least,” she said.

Pros and cons

School pantry advocates say pantries work because children and parents are often at the school anyway. It’s easy for a father to pick up a bag of food when he’s dropping off his children at school; it’s easy for a child to tote home meal fixings for the family.

And they say the pantries have benefits beyond filling stomachs. Students behave better and are able to focus more when they aren’t hungry. Parents who come in for food often form a relationship with school personnel, who are then able to suggest other help they might need. Teachers no longer have to buy their own snacks for kids they worry don’t have enough food.

“Without Good Shepherd I don’t know what we’d do,” Horn said. “We’d probably have to find money in our budget to go out and buy stuff like this. I’ll tell you, they are a godsend to us.”

But there are drawbacks to school pantries, too.

Schools have to find a place to keep the food. Someone has to run the program — ordering and tracking the food, dealing with getting it to the school, overseeing distribution — which can be difficult in schools that are already short staffed.

Sometimes the available food doesn’t meet the needs of the families it’s going to — they have no way to cook a box of macaroni and cheese when they’re homeless.

And even though Good Shepherd helps with the initial program setup, offers some start-up money and tries to connect schools with grant funding, schools are ultimately on their own to pay for most food received from the food bank.

Baked goods and fresh produce are free. Food donated to Good Shepherd is sold to the schools for between 3 and 16 cents a pound. And food bought wholesale by Good Shepherd as part of its mission is re-sold to the pantries at cost, which is cheaper than buying it at the grocery store but still not cheap.

For some cash-strapped schools, it can be too much.

“We have about $300 left on our account, which will be enough to get us through those last couple of weeks in June, but really our funding is out,” said Kaitlynn Brown, who oversees the food pantry at Montello Elementary School in Lewiston.

Montello started its pantry last January with a grant from Good Shepherd. Since September it’s spent about $3,500 providing food to 35 families, most of whom used the pantry multiple times throughout the year,

“That’s $100 a family to feed that family an entire year. That’s pretty amazing,” she said.

But Montello is on its own to pay for food next school year. It is now looking for sponsors or help with fundraising.

Brown said she would hate to see the pantry go.

“There are a number of families who would really suffer. They’ve come to rely on this as a way to supplement the food for their children,” she said. “I don’t believe people are abusing it. I think people have been very grateful for the support. And ultimately, we’re talking about kids. I don’t think anybody wants to think kids are going home and they’re not having food.”

For some schools, fundraising has worked. A Food Spirit Challenge in Auburn netted Edward Little thousands of dollars to use toward food from Good Shepherd. Pantry organizers don’t have to worry about shutting down anytime soon.

In fact, Horn has a better idea. He’d like to stock more food and invite local elementary schools to come by for food for their students. 

He believes it’s needed.

“I’d like to see it get bigger,” he said. 

ltice@sunjournal.com

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