Kerri Oratch, School Nutrition Director, shared that the pilot has changed everything. “It was too good to be true”, she said, describing the phone call from the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) asking if they’d be interested in participating in the pilot.
A few weeks ago, I drove 3 hours north from Milwaukee up to Marinette county to visit Dunbar Beecher Pembine School District. The school district is participating in the Amazon home delivery pilot this year, recommended by the state agency for its level of rurality and community need. Since starting the delivery pilot in June, the school district has enrolled 329 children in their program during peak volume, which represents more than 80% of their school enrollment.
Kerri Oratch, School Nutrition Director, shared that the pilot has changed everything. “It was too good to be true”, she said, describing the phone call from the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) asking if they’d be interested in participating in the pilot.
Before the summer program began, the school used Parent Square, Facebook and direct calls to families to notify them of the meal availability. They made contact with every student household in the district – totaling 225 children. When word got out about the program, families from other districts began messaging Kerri directly via Facebook messenger. After the state came out for an administrative review in June, spending five hours auditing paperwork and programmatic operations, they discovered no findings and gave the school district permission to add on kids from other districts. The process was simple: register students via a sign-up form, and cross check with other districts that they weren’t already receiving meals (it's worth noting that they only discovered one child overlapping). Rural non-congregate meal programs exist in towns near Pembine, but not home delivery. Some rural non-congregate programs also end in July, whereas this program runs up until school returns at the end of August. The county is made up of mining and logging industries, where many kiddos are at home and parents at work while pick-up sites are operating. So for those kids, the home delivery option was a game changer.
The school district has been using Umoja as their meal vendor and had an overall positive outlook on their experience with them. Meals are all shelf-stable and pre-packaged, so all the school has to do is label the boxes and transfer them from the palette to the Amazon truck. Meals are delivered on Monday and picked up by Amazon on Tuesday’s and Thursday’s. The small but mighty summer team is made up of the school secretary, school nutrition director, and two school nutrition staff, and two students who work at the school over the summer. I spoke to one of the students, who graduated this spring and is heading to college in Green Bay in the fall. He joked that he graduated top of his class – which was comprised of only nine students.
On whether the school will be implementing home delivery again next year, the answer was an absolute “yes.” Kerri is passionate about advocating for this program to other school districts in Wisconsin who might also benefit from it – with neighboring towns like Crandon already interested in signing up. Marinette is 1 of 8 counties that implemented rural non-congregate programming for the first time this summer in Wisconsin. In a rural state like Wisconsin, activating program flexibilities like the home delivery option make all the difference in keeping kids fed over the summer.
Watch a video on the success in Marinette County here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSa2Oipl0HA
