At Nootka Elementary, a Vancouver school of almost 400 students, a number of whom come from outside its catchment area, roughly a quarter need help with food.
Nootka Elementary is in the heart of the Vancouver’s Renfrew-Collingwood neighbourhood, an area with well-ordered and tidy streets.
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“We’re not in a place where people might typically think there are high needs,” said school principal Jesse Bemister. “But there is more need here than people might think at a glance.”
In a school of almost 400 students, a number of whom come from outside its catchment area, roughly a quarter need help with food.
Last year, staff in the school set up a food security committee to assist families that needed out-of-school help to feed themselves.
“We tried to identify the needs we saw in students and their families and to look at what resources we had to figure out how we were going to distribute that equitably,” said Bemister.
Having such a committee was something new for Bemister.
“I’ve never been in a school that had a food security committee before.”
Last year, they received help from a food bank on Broadway and accessed food that was distributed to some families.
But that relationship ended this year, and so far there has been no replacement.
“That was a source of food our families were getting every two weeks that they are not getting this year,” he said.
The school does not have a breakfast program for students arriving hungry, but provides snacks in the morning and throughout the day donated by Vancouver firefighters.
Some students receive lunch from the government’s Feeding Futures program, although Bemister is not sure that all those who need it were accessing it.
“We have a parent permission slip that goes with it saying, ‘Do you need this?’ And we have families that are good at advocating and asking for what they need, but there are those who are less inclined to do that,” he said.
Bemister wants to provide a hot lunch one day a week for the whole school starting in February.
Last year, the school’s PAC organized a lunch program that families could sign up for online.
Some weeks it was sandwiches delivered from Subway or pizza or sushi from local restaurants, with prices ranging from $6 a meal to $11.
“It was clear there were kids ordering all the time and ones that would never have the opportunity to get it.”
So he devised a sliding scale, pay-what-you-can lunch and immediately 100 or so more children were being logged on to receive it.
There was a button on the webpage that allowed for donations to help parents who couldn’t afford to pay for the meal in full.
And some generous parents used it, said Bemister, but donations didn’t cover the full cost of feeding lunch.
Now he wants to continue this sliding scale lunch starting in February through the rest of the school year.
For this to work he needs $6,000 from The Vancouver Sun’s Adopt-A-School program to cover the shortfall between what some families can afford to pay and the actual cost of the meal.
“It’s a bit of an experiment because we don’t know exactly how much short we will be,” he said. “But it will allow all of our kids to access lunch in a way that’s dignified.
“Our goal is to enhance equity in the school. It seems really unfair (if one child says), ‘Oh I’m getting sushi or pizza for my lunch today’ while other kids can never access it,” said Bemister.
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