This school year marks the 10th anniversary of the Blessings in a Backpack program at Salisbury Township School District.

Blessings in a Backpack is a nationwide organization providing elementary school students with food for when they are not in school on the weekend. This includes two breakfasts, two lunches and two snacks. The Lehigh Valley branch, founded and run by program director Jessica Schwartz, began at Salisbury Township School District around 10 years ago.

Salisbury Elementary School counselor, Cyndee Hill-Boddie, acted, and continues to act, as a liaison to help make this program possible.

“We’ve found that food security and being able to start a day knowing that food isn’t going to be a worry for this child has such positive influence on these kids,” Schwartz said. “They’re able to go about their day with a full stomach. They’re able to focus on the things that they need to do to be a kid, which is right now, learning and having fun. And so if we can take that worry, that stress, off these kids, all the studies are showing that it helps make them a better person, a better community member and a better functioning adult just by supporting at these very, very important years.”

Blessings in a Backpack Lehigh Valley currently supports around 180 students in the Salisbury Township, Saucon Valley and Southern Lehigh school districts.

“I focus my chapter on the schools that are kind of left to fall in between the cracks of the system a little bit,” Schwartz shared. “An Allentown School District – ... they have a lot of ability, due to the nature of the income levels within their school, to apply for these grants that sort of cover the entire student body. A school like Southern Lehigh School District and Saucon Valley School District still have a huge, and as we’re seeing an increasing number, of individuals with needs – they’re not able to tap into those higher level grants. So the idea behind the school districts that I support is to really help fill in those gaps and help the kids that might be falling through the system a little bit, maybe not getting as much assistance as they probably could.”

In 2015, Schwartz reached out to Salisbury Township School District in the hopes of helping to support their students’ needs. In recent years, around 70-80 students at SES are given food each week to eat during the weekend. Schwartz relies on school liaisons like Hill-Boddie to facilitate the distribution of the food.

“They bring their own backpack … they’re just receiving a little plastic grocery bag of food,” Hill-Boddie said. “They just come down to the cafeteria during breakfast. “We usually do it on a Friday, or if they don’t have school on a Friday, then it would be whatever the last day of the school week is. We do an announcement, and the children come down, and we give them their bags, they put in their backpack and they go back to class.”

The food provided is determined by menu guidelines from the national organization and they try to make sure the foods are easy for the kids to make.

“ ... they’re wanting the items to be things that children can easily prepare on their own,” Hill-Boddie said. “Some of the things are like a can of soup that they can heat up in the microwave, where you’re not required to add anything to it. Or a microwaveable macaroni and cheese where you’re just adding a little bit of water and then microwaving it. They would have cereal bars, sometimes little boxes of cereal. There’s a couple of snack items in there.”

To make this program possible, Blessings in a Backpack Lehigh Valley is always looking for support. Monetary donations help to purchase the items and an awareness of local food insecurity is important. Many local organizations and families have also taken the time to help purchase items and pack the bags.

“I’m kind of a one lady show, and so I actually do all of the purchasing, all of the packing and then I distribute it to each of the schools and then they internally distribute it within,” Schwartz said. “I’m seeing a lot of organizations, corporations, even just families or neighborhoods, are coming together, and they will host a packing food drive. So they basically take the list of our menu items, they either do a donation drive for specific items or monetary donations. They purchase the food, they pack the food into bags and then get those bags to me. That is a tremendous help to me in terms of time, and obviously helping with our bottom line, that allows me to really help more children in the program. It helps me really spread my wings a little bit more as well.”

Thanks to Hill-Boddie’s and Schwartz’s efforts for the past 10 years, Blessings in a Backpack is a program that helps support children throughout the Salisbury Township School District and beyond.