FAYETTE, Miss. – Most mornings, children are waiting beside the road with arms outstretched by the time driver Brian Hall pulls up in the decades-old yellow school bus.
As he pulls away, the bus creaking along toward his next stop on winding dirt roads, they already are breaking the plastic open to begin eating the day’s offerings: barbecue chicken, fish sticks or turkey tacos with cartons of milk and cans of juice.
“You can tell they need the food by the way they react to the deliveries,” Hall said. “We don’t know what they’re getting at home.”
More than half of all children in Jefferson County, Mississippi live in food insecurity, making it the hungriest county in the U.S. according to an October 2020 report by Feeding America, a non-profit and national network of food banks. All 1,100 students enrolled in Jefferson County School District qualified for free breakfast and lunch at school before the pandemic because of the high poverty rate.