A few cars are lined up outside the Park Hill School District Support Services Center building waiting to pick up their student’s package of meals that will last a week. The parents get out of their cars and wait for the one in front of them to leave before moving up.
A district employee asks a mother if she needs help carrying the load to her car. The woman declines but changes her mind after she already has a bag in one hand, a gallon of milk in the other and can’t handle the weight of a third bag.
“Maybe I will take the help,” the woman says and then the two strike up a conversation on the way to the car.
That’s the normal scene the first few weeks of the 2020-21 school year every Wednesday at the support services center that just opened this past January. District nutrition services director Ronda McCullick told the Platte County Citizen the center distributed meals to 580 students last week.
“We were a little overwhelmed until we got our processes in place,” McCullick said. “People were very kind and patient with us as we learned what we didn’t know.”
DENNIS SHARKEY/Citizen Photo
The new Support Services Center for the Park Hill School District has a walk-in freezer big enough to accommodate the frozen meal operation.
McCullick said things are running much more smoothly at the Service Center after working out some of the bugs from the first week.
Parents are given enough food to last an entire week. The Service Center only operates the pick-ups on Wednesdays so that staffing doesn’t become an issue.
With Park Hill’s hybrid schedule all students are at home on Wednesdays which frees up staff at schools to work at the Service Center.
McCullick said the district learned a lot from the experience last spring but had to rethink everything going into this school year with the plan the district set up. Things like packaging and delivering of meals had to be rethought.
“During the school year we thought we had things down,” McCullick said. “We’ve thrown that all out the window because we’ve started all over.”
McCullick said the district has done a lot of thinking outside the box and trying new ideas. Over the summer the district served some students and some trial runs were made in implementing those ideas.
“I think we’re serving them well; it’s just taken us thinking outside the box,” McCullick said. “We were able to ease into it a little bit more quickly than we might have been otherwise.”
Park Hill is also serving hot lunches everyday with two locations for parents to pick up meals. For students in the Park Hill High School boundaries, meals are picked up at Congress Middle School. For southern students the pick-up point is Walden Middle School.
Platte County R-3 School District is also in a hybrid model learning plan and has some students who have opted out of in person learning. Jay Harris, district executive director of operations, told the Platte County Citizen so far the district has served 20,000 meals with 2,000 of those meals being curbside pick-up. Harris said he expects the number of meals to go up in the coming weeks.
“That’s the trend we saw last spring into the summer,” Harris said. “After the first 30 days we started to see it pick up.”
District food services’ director Chelsea Brotherton told the newspaper the district has two pickup sites for parents. Students who live in the northern area of the district go to the Middle School in Platte City and students who live in the southern portion of the district go to Barry School.
Brotherton said parents can order meals online from a menu each day and can order up to a week out.
Harris said the district also received a United States Department of Agriculture waiver that allows all students to get free meals through the end of the calendar year.
“We’ve been pretty fortunate,” Harris said. “We were excited to announce that to the community.”
Brotherton said the waiver also allows anyone who lives in the district who is 18 years of age or younger to get free meals.
“That really helps out our families that have children who are not school age yet so they can feed all their children,” Brotherton said.
Harris said the district didn’t have to make a whole lot of changes other than to ask some employees to help out with directing things during pick-ups that occur between 12:30-1:30 p.m. each day of the work week.
“They’ve had to step up when needed for things like the curbside pick-up,” Harris said about employees. “Some are repurposing and we’re working together.
McCullick said Park Hill has learned a lot in the first month of school but expects there to be more learning as the school year progresses.
“We may do this for awhile and if we see a need we’re going to pivot to that so we’ll continue to change until we get it right.”