Weekday meals on which students rely when they attend school in person haven’t been lost to the coronavirus pandemic and the ensuing move to remote learning. But chances to connect with fellow students and staff have not been as easy to replicate via curbside pickup.
Count the Longmont Police Department’s 12 school resource officers among those who are missing face-to-face interaction.
The district’s meal program, however, is providing an opportunity to revive some of that face time. SROs this week began delivering meals to locations around town to make sure students who can’t get to one of the district’s 17 distribution sites can still receive the sack breakfasts and lunches.
“We realized kids throughout the city were not able to get to the pickup points … We worked with the district to determine where those kids are at,” said Master Police Officer Bill Clark, also a Skyline High SRO.
In its infancy, the delivery effort has focused on a few apartment complexes rather than individual households and officers do not have names of the specific students to whom they deliver, Clark said.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National School Lunch Program allows SVVSD to provide meals at no charge to children ages 1 to 18 and it can continue to do so through spring, Shelly Allen, the district’s director of Nutrition & Warehouse Services, told The Leader last month. “No one pays for any meal,’ she said.
From the start of the pandemic, the nutrition team at SVVSD has prepared more than a million meals, including 550,000 just in the past three months, Allen said late last month.
Kerri McDermid, the district’s chief communications and global impact officer, said the delivery effort is an indication of the heart SROs have for SVVSD.
“School resource officers care deeply about the well-being of our students and families, and are important partners in supporting our community,” she said via email.
On each of the first three days of the effort, which started Monday, officers delivered 15 meals, Clark said.
“We’re hoping it’s going to continue to grow,” he said. “... It’s not well-known quite yet.”
But even if officers aren’t delivering meals by the hundreds, the effort is feeding another need — for connection.
“It’s a way we can connect with students and families as school resource offices, even though we’re on all online learning right now,” said Sgt. Craig Mortensen, SRO supervisor.
SROs are more than police officers, they are members of the community who care about kids and their families and their well-being, he said.
“There’s a narrative out there that we have to get police out of schools. We don’t agree with that narrative. We can do so many things in the schools just connecting with kids,” Mortensen said.
