By Patrick Holmes
Lenoir County Public Schools
A $50,000 grant awarded through the national No Kid Hungry program to Lenoir County Public Schools will help stock emergency food pantries at middle and high schools and provide meals to carry at-risk students through their weekends.
While buying groceries for distribution as early as March, the grant will also serve as seed money for a more expansive effort to bring the same food assistance and nutrition education to older students that the district’s elementary schools now provide, according to LCPS Child Nutrition Director Danelle Smith, whose department won the grant.
“We wanted to do something for middle schools and high schools because there are a lot of programs that we’ve been doing for elementary schools,” Smith said. “We need more resources for our older students.”
When they eventually return to classrooms, thousands of North Carolina students - along with their teachers - will have access to rapid COVID-19 testing.
The N.C. Department of Health and Human Services has selected 17 school districts and 11 charter schools to receive more than 50,000 federally funded rapid antigen tests through its pilot testing program. Each school plans to offer classroom instruction for either some or all of its students this winter.
“This program gives us another tool in our tool kit to slow the spread of COVID-19 across our state and to keep children in the classroom, which we know is vital not only to their academic growth but also to their health and emotional development,” state health secretary Mandy Cohen said in a statement last week.
Students of migrant families get gift of laptops from ECU library
By Patrick Holmes
Lenoir County Public Schools
For students of migrant farmworker families in Lenoir County Public Schools, it might seem that Santa Claus has relocated to Laupus Library at East Carolina University.
A $75,000 federal grant awarded to the ECU library brought early Christmas presents of Lenovo laptops and accessories to 45 of these LCPS students. In all, the grant provided 100 laptops to students in eastern North Carolina, including 16 in Greene County, whose Migrant Education Program is administered by LCPS.
“Each laptop comes with a backpack, headphone/microphone headset and two USB drives, one loaded with the WiderNet ‘Pocket Library,’ a customized pocket library of health information sources,” said Laupus Library Associate Director Roger Russell, who helped coordinator the project.