By Jennifer Dorsett
Field Editor
One in four children in Texas are food insecure, according to Feeding Texas, a statewide network of food banks. And many of those kids face an entire weekend of hunger after the school week is over.
“We don’t know what happens to a student for a third of their week,” Dyron Howell, founder of Amarillo-based Snack Pak 4 Kids (SP4K), said. “Because they have access to lunch and breakfast every day at school, we assume that when they leave on Fridays, there’s going to be food. Yet, our teachers tell us that they go without. When they come back on Monday morning, they are not prepared to learn, because they’ve gone without nutrition all weekend.”
Ten years ago, Howell and his wife, Kelly, watched an episode of ABC’s Nightline featuring a teacher from Bowie, Texas, who was working to end child hunger in her community.
“At the end of that story, she looked in the camera and said, ‘If you don’t think this is happening in your community, you need to take off your blindfold and see,’” Howell said.
Feeling a sense of conviction, the Howells began looking around their community. What they found astounded them.
Amarillo was the largest city west of Dallas without a weekend backpack program, where charities and other organizations work to provide students in need with shelf-stable meals for the weekend.
The Howells began asking others where they thought there might be children in need. Several pointed them toward Rogers Elementary, so Dyron visited the principal and explained their idea.
The principal had 10 students who she suspected wouldn’t have adequate food throughout the upcoming Labor Day weekend. So, she agreed to let the couple help.
The Howells purchased non-perishable food items, sacked them and delivered the bags to the school.
The next week, the principal asked if the Howells could help 20 kids. The week after that, it was 30 kids.
Then, something strange happened.
“Not much later, a student was having an asthma attack—one of the students we were feeding. The principal called his mom to come pick him up, and it was a Friday afternoon. He refused to leave school until he got his bag of food and his sibling’s bag of food,” Howell said. “Think about that. Here is this student, needing his breathing treatment, needing to take care of his medical issue, yet for him, nutrition for himself and his sibling was more important. And it just hit us all. It was like, ‘Oh my goodness, this is what hunger really looks like in my school.’”
The Howells continued to show up week after week, bringing food to kids who would otherwise go hungry for the weekend. They worked with leaders and principals across the Amarillo school district, growing the program from one campus to the next.
Together, they built an entirely new model to fight weekend hunger.
There are no forms to fill out, no public distributions. Teachers identify students they think may have a need and let them decide whether to participate. Then, every Friday, the teacher discreetly places a Snack Pak in the student’s backpack.
Kids are able to engage more in the classroom knowing their weekend won’t be full of hunger and uncertainty. And they show up on Monday morning full of energy and ready to learn.
Each of the 14 items found in every Snack Pak is sampled and selected by a group of kid taste-testers. And everything is name brand. That seems like an insignificant detail, but Howell said to the kids who receive the packs, it means so much.
“Dignity and respect are priceless. You can’t tell the youth of your community and the students in your community that they’re important, they’re our future, and that they matter, and then give them leftovers, or less than,” he said. “We tell the kids that they matter and they’re important by the brands that we give them. They have the same foods and same brands their peers have.”
SP4K now feeds more than 10,000 students in 51 school districts. But in the early years, there was a problem procuring enough protein for the Snack Paks.
Protein is essential for growth and development. Children who don’t get enough protein may experience health issues, including poor concentration, excessive fatigue, delayed or reduced growth, bone and joint pain, delayed wound healing and decreased immune response.
“Early on, our kids did not have access to protein. It’s expensive, and it’s a significant investment,” Howell said. “Initially, we partnered with our dairy producers here to get milk into each package. Many people don’t know a significant portion of the dairy production in our state comes from the Texas Panhandle, but what more of a logical place to partner with than with our dairy producers?”
Area dairy farmers were proud to help.
“A big challenge in food banks and other feeding programs is finding high-quality products, especially when it comes to milk, because milk isn’t traditionally shelf-stable,” Brent Bouma, whose family owns and operates Legacy Farms in Plainview, said. “But now, through new technologies like ultra-pasteurization and aseptic packaging, we’re able to have a shelf-stable product that doesn’t have to be refrigerated.”
Legacy Farms is part of a dairy cooperative that produces milk for Fairlife, a brand of ultra-filtered milk products.
“The shelf life on one of our small bottles of Fairlife is over six months, and that’s a game changer for programs like these because you’re able to get that really nutritious, good tasting, high-quality food into these kids’ backpacks and lockers. It doesn’t have to be cold or go straight into the refrigerator when they get home,” Bouma said.
Fairlife isn’t only a quality, shelf-stable product. The special filtering process results in lactose-free milk which contains 13 grams of protein and 50 percent less sugar than regular chocolate milk.
And the kids love it. According to Howell, the chocolate variety is a favorite among taste-testers each year.
“The average food-insecure kid accesses one gallon of milk a year outside of school,” he said. “Yet through our partnership with agriculture and our dairy producers, we give kids five gallons of milk every year–five times the nutrition and the nutrients associated with dairy.”
Bouma said his cooperative made a commitment to provide the milk at or less than cost.
“We all agreed it made sense,” he said. “What we do every day is produce food, and if we can’t make sure that our own communities are well-fed and taken care of, then our focus is too broad. We literally feed the world from this region, but we’ve got to take care of the kids in our own communities, too.”
Another partnership was created with the beef sector.
“We are the beef capital of America out here, so it makes a whole lot of sense to have beef protein,” Howell said. “And we commercially bought beef sticks for a long time.”
Buying the beef sticks for each Snack Pak was expensive, though. Someone suggested making their own, and the idea took off from there.
“We wanted to create something the kids would really enjoy,” Howell said. “And after about 10 tries, we got it right, and it’s a product anyone would enjoy and be happy to buy.”
Various partners throughout the beef supply chain helped make the SP4K Beef Stik happen.
Feedyards donate animals to the program. Caviness Beef Packers processes the animals and donates an equivalent amount of brisket and chuck roast meat to Clint & Sons Processing, a custom processing plant, retail meat outlet and wholesale jerky/food service meat manufacturer.
From there, Clint & Sons manufacturers and packages the beef sticks. Each one contains nine grams of complete protein, which is only obtainable from animal sources such as dairy, meat, poultry, fish and eggs.
They’re sold to the general public at retail locations across the Panhandle and available for shipping online through a buy-one-give-one model. For every Snak Pak Beef Stik sold, one is donated back to the SP4K program.
“Agriculture has a rich history of serving in their communities. They’re a very generous people, and they want to do their best in the communities where they live and serve,” Wayne Craig, chairman of the Texas Cattle Feeders Association (TCFA) industry relations committee, said. “Contributing to Snack Pak 4 Kids gives us an opportunity to provide our products to those that are under-resourced, and it’s quality beef from right here in the heart of cattle country.”
Howell said when participants were surveyed last year, their favorite food product in the Snack Paks was the beef stick.
“Our kids are telling us they want access to quality protein, and specifically quality beef protein,” he said. “What better way than to make a product that our kids love, but the public enjoys, as well.”
Each Snack Pak provides kids with 74 grams of protein, a feat Howell says wouldn’t be possible without community agricultural partnerships.
“We’re not where we are today with protein without our agriculture partners,” he said. “I hear so much in the media today about negativity around agriculture, and what agriculture doesn’t do, or the chaos within agriculture, or this or that. Yet, if you look at this program, we’re giving kids 74 grams of protein, and fully 70 percent of that is because of our agriculture partners. We are where we are because we embraced agriculture, and we embraced the potential that they had to transform what we give our kids, and more importantly, transform the health of our kids.”
Howell said other organizations can enter the larger SP4K buying cooperative to provide quality name-brand items at or below cost in their own schools and communities.
For more information on Snack Pak 4 Kids, including how to start a weekend backpack program in your community, visit the organization at http://sp4k.org.
Watch our video on the program here.