St. Vincent de Paul picks up summer meal effort

Originally facing cancellation, a program that provides free meals to local children each summer gained a last-minute reprieve.

Earlier this month, the Society of St. Vincent de Paul in Mountain Home announced it will take charge of the "Food for Thought" program.

"We didn't want to see it go away. Too many kids depend on it," said Lisa Stover-Russell, president of the local Catholic charity organization.

Each summer, the program served up to 600 meals a day for local area children. Meals were also available for adults for a small fee.

Affiliated with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the program served both lunch and dinner five days a week. However, once it resumes on June 3, it will remain limited to a lunch service, Stover-Russell said.

Volunteers will serve the meals in Carl Miller Park from noon and 1 p.m. Monday to Friday through Aug. 9.

In April, the Mountain Home School District announced that it was canceling its involvement in the Food for Thought program, citing recent changes in state requirements. It would've been the first time in recent history that Mountain Home would've gone without the free meal outlet.

"The district decided that it wasn't feasible to run it any more," said Brian Hershey, the school district's food service director.

Discussions with local and state officials seemed to provide conflicting accounts of what drove the district's decision.

According to Hershey, new restrictions and requirements mandated by state officials last year were making it increasingly harder for the local school district to keep the food program running.

For example, volunteers that helped out last summer were now being ordered to complete extensive food handling training, "even though they were just wiping down tables or handing out packages of cookies," Hershey said.

Colleen Fillmore, state director for child nutrition, indicated that those requirements were not directed at the Food for Thought program. While there were a number of changes in the national school lunch program, they didn't affect the way the state ran its summertime program, she said.

The state director felt the school district may have confused these new school lunch requirements with the ones that involve the summer food program. For instance, volunteers don't need formal training to help out during the summer program, she said.

Fillmore did say there were some technical changes made at the state level involving a few rules on how the summer program was run locally. However, they primarily focused on the meal patterns used to develop menus for each day.

However, Hershey said there were additional rules instituted by the state. Among them was a requirement that would've forced the district to serve the lunch and dinner meals at two different locations versus keeping everything in one central location.

For years, the school district served lunch at the cook shack in Carl Miller Park with dinner available at East Elementary School.

"We would've had to keep two kitchens open all summer (under the new requirements), which wasn't feasible," Hershey said.

In response, Fillmore said that requirement had always been in place.

When asked about the conflicting accounts from state and local officials, school district superintendent Tim McMurtrey said there were instances in which legal red tape was getting in the way of running these types of food programs.

"From our point of view, the state was difficult to work with regarding nutritional values" of meals served in local area schools, McMurtrey said.

For example, the schools were unable to prepare and serve simple slices of pizza -- typically a simple meal to prepare -- without having to adhere to these stringent standards.

But what really convinced the district to end the summer meal initiative involved a series of instances in which people broke into East Elementary and caused an undetermined amount of vandalism to the building. The people apparently entered the school through a door that was opened each day to allow food workers to use the school's kitchen, according to the district superintendent.

"At that point, we said we're done with having to fix the school while we were trying to do something good for the community," McMurtrey said.

Hoping to find another route to keep the program up and running, the school district originally sought help from the city library and parks and recreation department. In both instances, the city agencies ran into similar roadblocks thrown at them by the new state regulations. "They said 'We can't do this. It's just too much paperwork,' " Hershey said.

In fact, it took roughly six weeks for the local Society of St. Vincent de Paul organization to complete the application process to take over the program.

"It was pretty rigorous since it's a federal program," Stover-Russell said. "However, these are good, nutritious meals, and the kids here will really like it."