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Credit: USDAgov via Creative Commons CC-PDM-1.0 In order to reach more hungry families, some summer-meal programs are allowing parents to pick up food rather than requiring kids to eat it on site. New Jersey schools and community organizations fed twice the number of children last summer than the year before, providing meals to many who may have gone hungry otherwise due to the pandemic’s effect on families and on typical summer children’s programs. Recognizing those great needs, more communities participated in federal summer-meal programs than before. The waiver of some rules due to the pandemic and a new state law requiring some public school districts to participate in the summer-meals program also helped boost the number of children served on an average day last July to almost 204,000. That represents 51% of the children who receive free or reduced-price school lunches, compared with just 26% who got meals in July 2019, according to a new report from Hunger Fr ....
Plenty of New Jersey school districts have been offering free meals to families during the coronavirus pandemic, but a new report suggests many kids aren t actually getting their hands on this food. According to data from the Food Research & Action Center, the number of free and low-cost school lunches served to New Jersey children, as well as the number of children served, plummeted 51% from April 2019 to April 2020. Breakfast participation dropped 36% during that time frame. We definitely expected the number of meals and kids served would go down, but not that much that s a huge drop, said Nancy Parello, communications director for Hunger Free New Jersey. ....