The Putnam County Schools offering free after-school meals to students through a partnership with the Child and Adult Care Food Program.
Schools Nutrition Supervisor Jennifer Mitchell said the meals offer students a snack before they head home. Mitchell said the meal program has worked well in conjunction with the after-school programs.
“Most of the programs are to help those who stay after school for tutoring or for other activities, so it was just a good opportunity to try to reach out to those students to provide them with a supper, or a dinner meal, or a snack,” Mitchell said.
Mitchell said October will mark the start of the second year for the program. Mitchell said she learned a lot from the first year and hopes to make program improvements heading into year two.
“We have had to do more monitoring visits, like four monitoring visits per site, and so from those site visits, we have, you know, learned to tweak some things,” Mitchell said. “So we hope this will have a smoother year this second year.”
Mitchell said most of the tweaks are on the administrative side of the program, like monitoring forms and tracking data. Mitchell said improving those areas of the program is crucial.
“That’s what we get reimbursed for, because of course, we can’t do this without getting reimbursement back. And so we have to provide documentation that you know, students are in attendance, and that they did receive their meal. So those daily records, we have to have those to bakc up what we call our claim for reimbursement.”
Mitchell said the meal program is not offered at every school in the school system. The program will be offered at Algood Elementary, Algood Middle, Avery Trace Middle, Baxter Primary, Burks Elementary, Capshaw Elementary, Cane Creek Elementary, Cornerstone Elementary, Jere Whitson Elementary, Northeast Elementary, Park View School, Prescott South Elementary/Middle, Sycamore Elementary, and Upperman Middle School.
Mitchell said that students from any school in the school system can visit one of the schools to receive a meal. Mitchell said she encourages participation as the program needs participation to continue to serve these meals.
