(Nov. 22) -- Every Friday afternoon, the backpacks are placed carefully on the floors of the hallways in the elementary schools of Moberly, Mo.
There are 106 of them: 106 backpacks, each of them with no child's name and with no individual owner.
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Moberly School District
Hungry elementary school students in Moberly, Mo., who might not eat much between lunch on Friday and breakfast at school on Monday take home backpacks full of food.
The backpacks tell a story that can both break your heart and make your heart swell with admiration.
And if you ever had any doubt about what the financial mess in the United States is doing to families across the country ...
Well, those 106 backpacks in Moberly will erase those doubts pretty quickly.
"We're a rural community," said Mark Penny, the superintendent of the Moberly Public Schools. "We're pretty much in the middle of the state."
The backpacks are there because Penny and his staff know that without them, the children for whom they are intended might go hungry between the last bell of the day Friday and the first bell Monday morning.
The backpacks -- property of the school -- are filled with food.
The idea is that, when those 106 children leave class on Friday afternoons, they will pick up the backpacks, sling them over their shoulders and casually walk out of the school with their classmates.
The idea is that the children who need the food -- they range in age from kindergartners to fifth-graders -- will blend in with the hundreds of other boys and girls who get enough to eat at home and that the 106 children will feel no stigma.
"We serve breakfast at school, and we serve lunch," said Francine Nichols, the school staff member in charge of the backpack project. "But we began to realize that some of these children go home to houses where they literally may not eat over the weekend. And we couldn't just sit back and not do anything to help them."
So, three years ago, the backpack program started. When the school senses that a child is chronically hungry -- "A lot of times, they just tell their teacher," superintendent Penny said -- the parents are contacted. If the parents are willing to accept the help, the children are told privately that a backpack will be waiting in the hallway Friday afternoon.
"We'll fill each backpack with soup, with ravioli in a can, with canned fruit, with cereal bars, with juice," Francine Nichols said. "We make sure that the food is the kind that a young child can prepare himself or herself, if need be. Because some of these children live in single-parent homes, and when that parent works, not only does it mean that there may not be enough food in the house, but there may not be anyone to fix the meal for the boy or girl."
Moberly is far from the only school district in the country to have a program like this. Quietly, they exist all over the nation. The first one that is often cited was organized in the 1990s by a hunger-relief group known as the Arkansas Rice Depot.
The weekend-food programs are not run by the federal government but by local communities that simply can't stand the idea of children going without enough food.
And in Moberly, the need has increased in the past year, with the national recession and high unemployment.
"The economy has not exactly been a blessing to families lately," Nichols said. "Last November, we had 34 children for whom we prepared the backpacks every Friday. This November it is 106. So that tells you something."
There are some weeks, she said, when she goes to the school storeroom to fill the backpacks, "and I don't know how there will be enough food."
Much of it is provided by the Central Missouri Food Bank in Columbia, 30 miles away. That agency's executive director, Peggy Kirkpatrick, said that one year in one town -- not Moberly -- a 9-year-old boy took a backpack of food home each Friday but admitted to his teacher that he wasn't eating it all. When the teacher asked him why, the boy said:
"Because Christmas vacation is coming."
He was saving the food. He was hoarding it, because he wanted to make it last over the two weeks away from school.
But in Moberly, Francine Nichols said, some parents whose children have been helped by the backpack program contact the school when they have found work again and say that because they are back on their feet, they no longer need the assistance. "And then they begin to provide food for the program; they bring food to school to help other children," Nichols said.
