TEACHER CREATES FREE SNACK STOP TO PREVENT HUNGER, STIGMA


 

TEACHER CREATES FREE SNACK STOP TO PREVENT HUNGER, STIGMA

Primary School first-grade teacher Darla Hursh remembers what it was like when she was a young student waiting for food in grade school.

“I was a free and reduced lunch kid when I was little, we had tickets and you’d walk up to the little table and they had to sort through and get your ticket and they’d punch your ticket. And everybody with money could just go right ahead. It always felt like everybody knew,” Hursh recalled early Wednesday morning before her students arrived. “I’ve been teaching for 20 years and there’s always that handful of kids that never have their snack.”

Nearly half the students at Marzolf Primary School in the Shaler Area School District where Darla Hursh teaches first grade are eligible to receive free or reduced lunch.

“We have a need here,” she said. “It kind of hit me that these kids are coming to the teachers day after day after day asking for a snack and we all provide that extra snack for the kids. But everybody else sees it. All the other kids see that they’re not getting it every now and then, because they forgot, they’re getting it day after day. So, I kind of wanted to remove that stigma around it and make it more private.” So, Hursh came up with the idea of creating a “snack stop” or cupboard stocked with various free snacks for kids that can’t afford them. Every Monday morning, students select snacks for the entire week. The snacks are stored in their lockers where they go to grab them each day just like all the other kids and “no one is the wiser.”

Teachers recommend which students should have access based on need. Since it opened a few weeks ago, Darla reports that about 37 students are using the Snack Stop daily. Hursh orchestrated this for the last six weeks of the last school year but felt she needed to find a sponsor to make it happen this year. She ended up finding Greg McDonald’s State Farm Insurance agency in Fox Chapel to underwrite the program. McDonald donated $1,500. Other donations are flowing to support the long term viability of the Snack Stop.

“When I heard about this, I said ‘this is pretty cool,’” McDonald said.It made him think about his own childhood growing up in a lower middle-class family. “When I grew up in Lawrenceville, it was not the Lawrenceville that you see today. Just growing up with those humble beginnings makes you say ‘What can I do now to make it a little better for the person after me?’ If we all just try to do a little bit better for the community than what we had, no matter how good or bad it was, it’s going to keep us progressing.”

Hursh said snack time comes around mid-morning to help get the students through that slump to lunch time. “If they’re hungry, they’re not learning,” she said. “We should be able to get through most of the year with (McDonald’s contribution) and then I’m going to look for donors.”

Shaler Area School District superintendent Sean Aiken had nothing but praise for Hursh’s efforts. “This is offering tremendous benefit to our students,” Aiken said. “We appreciate the hard work and the effort that goes into it. It just represents who we are as a school district. We think of what the needs of our students are and we work to find solutions for that. So, I appreciate Darla and the other teachers that are involved with this.”

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