This is a YouTube video titled "School Lunch During COVID-19" containing a monologue or single-speaker discussion from April 28, 2020, about the challenges and adaptations of school meal programs during the COVID-19 pandemic, including delivery methods and the role of government food assistance programs like SNAP and food banks.
What COVID-19 has done is flip, so everyone's now out of school. It's the summer meal program, which is the program that the USDA has allowed everyone to convert to. So that allows community partners as well as schools to prepare and serve meals for kids. You've got this added issue that parents and kids are afraid to come out of their homes, right? So we need to, you know, kind of supplement with delivery. There's amazing things happening across the country where school buses are being lit up as delivery vehicles to bring, that's amazing. And there's a whole variety of things that are happening. So really well-run school food programs are producing meals, turning them out and packaging them and sending them to families across the country. There's a lot of work to do. So for example, in Boston, we're distributing probably around 10 or 12,000 meals a day currently. We're only a week into this, sorry, two weeks into this, God time just flies. But we feed 30,000 kids a day in the city of Boston, usually two or three meals a day. And so there's a lot of room too for growth here. What summer meals do though in this time is it's really that plus SNAP, plus the food bank that many families are- SNAP, food bank. Yeah, yes, exactly, exactly. So these government subsidized programs that provide food, and it's in combination, right? Families who rely on school food are also probably relying on SNAP or some other federal subsidies or the food banks to, bring food into their homes.
