Franklin school food pantry targets older students, families

FRANKLIN, Ind. (AP) - Elementary students in Franklin can take a backpack filled with food home for the weekend, but older students sometimes go hungry.

To help those students, a food pantry for families of middle school and high school students opened in November.

The new pantry, called Cub Pantry, will help fill a gap for older Franklin students, according to Kimberly Spurling, community outreach coordinator for the schools.

"That demographic wasn't being served," she said.

The school teamed with Gleaners Food Bank in Indianapolis to start a school-run food pantry in Franklin. Gleaners donated a refrigerator and freezer and keeps the pantry stocked with food, diapers, toiletry items and cleaning supplies. Each month, Spurling can order items families need most, and the food bank will ship them to the school.

Some of the need for the food pantry comes from Franklin's homeless population, Spurling told the Daily Journal (http://bit.ly/1CURiIE ). Johnson County had 600 students considered homeless in 2013, and Franklin Community School Corp. had the highest percentage of them.

The homeless in Johnson County come to Franklin because it's the county seat and more resources are available to them, Spurling said. They live in hotels or spend nights on the couches of friends and family. They enroll their children in Franklin schools.

"I refer to our homeless as the hidden homeless," Spurling said. "We wanted to make sure we were giving them as many resources as possible."

On a single day in January, about 18 families came to get food. Spurling and Monica Anderson, a guidance counselor at the high school, said they expect the food pantry can help more families.

Any family who has a student attending the middle school or high school in Franklin can get help from the pantry, which is open 4 to 6?p.m. the first Thursday of the month.

The food pantry is in a room at the middle school, where jars of peanut butter, cans of meat and vegetables and boxes of cereal fill wire racks. The refrigerator and freezer are stuffed with perishable foods, and sometimes Gleaners send fresh vegetables or gallons of milk, Spurling said.

After just a few months, their food items have outgrown their pantry. Some items are stuffed into the freezer for school staff, Anderson said.

Students help unload and unpack the deliveries from the pantry the week it is open.

School officials don't mind helping with a social service such as a food pantry, Anderson said. Part of the school's job is to make sure students have the tools to learn, and hungry students don't learn, she said.

"As a school, we want to take care of the whole child," she said.

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Information from: Daily Journal, http://www.dailyjournal.net