In Search of Young Mouths To Feed In Summer - washingtonpost.com: Montgomery County officials dispatch a school bus daily to roam a Silver Spring neighborhood with an unlikely task: find children interested in going to school, in midsummer, for the food.
Children from low-income homes are entitled to federally subsidized meals year-round. Yet the free or reduced-price meals reach fewer than one in five eligible children nationwide during the summer break. The task of getting food to kids falls to a patchwork of schools and community groups with summer programs, a network that cannot match the scope of what's available during the school year. Millions of children pass July and August malnourished and idle, conditions that promote obesity and widen the well-documented learning gap between haves and have-nots.
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Recent initiatives in Montgomery, the District and elsewhere in the region are part of a national movement to mend this inequity. Bologna sandwiches, chocolate milk, seasonal fresh fruit and the like are shipped by the refrigerated truckload to more than 30,000 schools, community centers and churches nationwide throughout the summer. The eventual goal is for disadvantaged children to eat as well when school's out as they do when school's in.
