SAN ANTONIO -- School districts all across the state have provided tens of thousands of curbside meals to students 18 and under in response to the coronavirus pandemic. This can pose a challenge for families who don’t have proper transportation. North East ISD in San Antonio understands that, which is why it is bringing the meals to its students.
- NEISD offering curbside meal delivery
- Not all families have the means to pick food up
- NEISD now brining meals to students
NEISD dispatcher Vincent Casiano enjoys surprising students with breakfast and lunch.
“It’s been an exciting event. It’s something that we’ve not encountered before, not done before. It’s an exciting new discovery for all of us,” Casiano says.
Casiano is able to assist families who don’t live near the district's 32 curbside locations through the NEISD Fresh Express Delivery.
“We’ve created bus routes hitting more than 40 of our neighborhoods, so we have 12 buses and each bus hits three to five locations each day,” Sharon Glosson, executive director of school nutrition, says.
The 12 buses meet at MacArthur High School where cafeteria and transportation staff are preparing and loading the meals.
“The only way to tackle such a huge challenge is with everybody coming together with the different resources they have available,” Glosson says.
Once the meals are loaded, the buses hit the streets, feeding more than 10,000 students a day. It's a number that continues to grow.
An NEISD logo appears on a jacket in this image from March 2020. (Jose Arredondo/Spectrum News)
Bus No. 350 hit northeast neighborhoods that feed into Roosevelt High School. The second stop was a low-income neighborhood called the Glen.
As Casiano and NEISD staff handed out meals he would echo the same thing: “We’ll be back tomorrow, same time, same place.”
Glosson believes NEISD can adapt to the growing numbers of students needing meals.
“As things go on and the outage continues, we know that we may have more challenges,” Glosson says. “But we feel that we can make adjustments because our number one goal is to keep feeding the kids.”
These efforts are not going unnoticed.
“All the parents and all the students they have been great, they have appreciative of everything we’ve done,” Casiano says.