The Hillcrest Breakfast Club has had to reinvent the way in which it serves students, but it has found a way to continue meeting young people’s nutritional needs.
Sara Pippus, who is the school community liaison at Hillcrest, said they shifted away from the buffet-style breakfast, and the kids can’t gather in the breakfast club’s room. But now they have placed a pantry of dried goods in each room, and then each morning they pack a cooler with individual breakfasts for the students.
“We’re finding that a lot more kids are able to access our breakfast program that way, which is good, and we are able to serve more kids, so that’s what we’re doing right now,” said Pippus.
Each day they serve 80-100 kids, which is more than normal. In past years, when they had the buffet-style lunch, they would serve about 65 kids.
“And it depends on the day. Some days every student in the school will utilize our breakfast, and sometimes we’ll have days where not as many do. It changes every day, which keeps us hopping and is quite good, too,” said Pippus.
Each day the breakfast program serves little bags of cereal, muffins, yogurt and turkey bites and cheese. A juice or milk will be served for a beverage.
The breakfast club also serves fruit options such as a sugar-free apple sauce.
“We try to mix it up depending on the day. We try to hit all of the food groups, if possible, and most of the things we’re serving right now are pretty heavily pre-packaged, so that’s something that we’re trying to look at making changes to, so that it’s easier on our budget,” said Pippus.
Students have adapted well to the change. They’re a resilient group, she said, and they have adjusted well to all of the changes.
“The ones who have had to do all of the organizing and things are probably the ones who are in a little bit of a scramble, but now that we’ve settled in, we’re past the mid-October point, and we’re settling into how things will go for the next little while,” she said.
A lot of parents were asking about the breakfast program and how it would work prior to the start of the school year.
“I think there’s a lot of people who rely on breakfast for various reasons, that we just think it’s really good to have everybody (included). We know when we serve breakfast like this that anybody who wants it can have it, and the universality of it makes it so that the kids don’t get missed.”
The breakfast club would traditionally have several volunteers helping out each day with the breakfast buffets. This year they are limited to just two volunteers. They selected a couple of volunteers who are closely connected to Hillcrest through the school community council.
A spare volunteer has also been trained.
Throughout the summer, the school was planning to make sure it would be able to have a breakfast program. It took some effort, but they’re able to serve as many kids as possible in the limited time they have, and they’ve done it well.
