SALEM — It’s an odd circumstance when a school administrator tells students to not use the pantry and instead get back to class.
Or, it’s the sign of a desperately needed system working to solve a social need, with a better opportunity for students to get free food coming once the bell rings in a half hour and school is actually dismissed for the day.
Salem Pantry has partnered with Salem High School and Salem State University to bring its services to the schools on a weekly basis throughout the winter. They’re doing it via “The Truck,” a recently added pantry service on wheels that can stage anywhere it has permission to. When visiting Salem High this week, it was loaded with fresh fruit, boxes of milk, bags of different kinds of nuts, microwavable meals, and more.
While The Truck is new, the Pantry serving Salem High School isn’t.
“It was a pilot program that happened during lunchtime during school. The first year, we got up to maybe 30 kids every week,” said Jeni Indresano, a volunteer with the Pantry and parent of a high school senior. “Last year, we were at 100, 120. The kids were coming down both to get a little snack in the day... but also, students were shopping for their families for the week.”
The visibility of the need led to an increase in offerings in-house. Today, that includes clothing through The Clothing Connection, which maintains a clothing store with a pop-up dressing room in an unused classroom space.
“This is a goal of ours, to make Salem High the hub of our whole community,” school Principal Glenn Burns said. “To be able to provide access to a variety of resources, whether it’s the Teen Health Center, the food pantry, Clothing Connection, college and career resources... we have individuals come in to help with financial aid documents.
“We have to make sure we’re providing for all the needs, and this is just another partnership that allows us to do that,” he said. “It’s great to see all of our families, our school community taking advantage of the resources we’re providing.”
Taking advantage may be an understatement.
A recent visit to the school’s pantry offering by The Salem News was interrupted by a scheduled fire drill, causing the entire school to evacuate as the pantry was setting up. Generally, it serves staff and families in the half-hour prior to dismissal and then students as they leave the building for the day.
The fire drill disrupted that plan, as it coincided with The Truck being in front of Salem High. As the drill ended and students had a half-hour of class remaining, many instead swarmed The Truck for food, prompting Mario Souza, SHS’s head of career tech education, to rush in and return the crowd to that final half-hour of study.
“You have to get back to class,” Souza said, waving his arms to direct the students toward the building. “You can get food after.”
For Burns, the demand for the pantry is evidence of a system working as designed.
“The services were in place prior to me coming on board. What we’ve really seen is the services becoming more visible, like The Truck being rolled right up here,” he said. “This level of services is critical to our community, in making sure we’re providing a means to meet all our students’ needs and the variety of needs. This partnership with the Salem Pantry really allows us to meet a really basic human need, which is sustenance, nutrition, and provide our families with ease of mind a bit by knowing the school can support them in more ways than one.”
