Teaching and Feeding Our Youth
Close your eyes and picture a peanut butter sandwich.
Simple enough, right? Two slices of bread with peanut butter in between, wrapped in a plastic bag for safekeeping.
Now imagine the same peanut butter sandwich being gifted to a school-aged child by their teacher, because the teacher knows that when their student goes home for the weekend, there isn’t any food in the cupboards.
In reality, from the time that student leaves on Friday until they return to a school-provided breakfast on Monday morning, they likely won’t have access to food. Further imagine that same peanut butter sandwich being hidden in the ceiling tiles of a child’s home, in fear that one of their siblings or parents may eat it before they do. Sadly, this scenario is real.
Sharon Mantey, a recently retired teacher from Racine, Wisconsin, provided that peanut butter sandwich.
In Mantey’s 37 years as an educator, she provided way more than one meal to her students. Mantey, paying out of pocket, made sure her class always had “snack time” to bridge the gap between breakfast and lunch. She consistently sent food home with students, knowing there wouldn’t be anything waiting for them.
“You could tell before they even sat down,” Mantey recalls of how student behavior varied depending on hunger. “Mondays were always rough. Kids were coming off of weekends with very little food and a lack of sleep. You knew on Mondays that you had to try something.”
Schools do receive some funding to meet the needs of their student population. In Mantey’s case, the last school where she taught had a 96% poverty rate, and 100% of the students received free or reduced-price lunch.
“Behaviors were accelerated on Fridays because of the outlook of going home to a lack of food,” she adds.
Feeding America Eastern Wisconsin’s Healthy Kids Healthy Summer campaign is an effort to provide these students with food in the summer when teachers like Mantey don’t have the opportunity to see them five days out of the week. Mantey’s recount acknowledges the massive need for assistance.
“Sometimes summer food pickups would be at a school two miles away,” she says. “Students can’t get there. You don’t want little kids walking there. Some of our families don’t have cars.”
Feeding America Eastern Wisconsin understands these issues and works with a network of nearly 400 food pantries, organizations, shelters, and more to provide access to food, right in the neighborhoods where it’s needed most.
Teachers like Mantey are heroes to children facing hunger. Your gifts make you a hero too, and allow us to meet the needs in our communities.
