A-P's Grab-n-Go passes 10,000 meals served

The Aplington-Parkersburg school district recently passed a major milestone with its Grab-n-Go lunch initiative, going over the 10,000-lunches-served mark for families in the district.

“We’ve served 10,721 meals since March 23,” said Aplington-Parkersburg head cook Cindy Stroh in a phone teleconference that included A-P/Grundy Center Superintendent Robert Hughes, “which is amazing.”

Grab-n-Go launched back in March, just as COVID-19 guidelines in Iowa were ramping up. The Grab-n-Go program is meant as a way to supplement meals for district students during the shutdown of educational facilities in the state through the end of the year.

On an average day, the staff and volunteers—anywhere between 12 and 15 over the course of the day-- arrive at the high school at 8 a.m., and begin prepping. They plan for 620 meals to be ready to be received by 11 a.m. at the high school and the Aplington building.

Stroh explained that they’ve done some restructuring from their initial model, and things move much more efficiently now.

“We were originally taking lunches out on a cart,” Stroh said, “but because of unpredictable weather, at the last minute we had to throw them into the bus so we wouldn’t get wet.” Now, Stroh said, they just use the bus right way.

“It’s more efficient,” she said, “and out of the wind and weather, and people don’t have to get out of their cars.”

In addition to the curb-side nature of the delivery, there are a few area families that are unable to attend, so there’s a team of dedicated staff members that deliver those to individual homes.

“There’s a lot of organization,” she continued, “a ton of people involved. It’s quite a venture.”

In that vein, with so many frequently changing variables based on the nature of the virus, Stroh and her team had to plan ahead for the future. With summer just around the corner, and an established summer lunch program that served as inspiration for this Grab-n-Go program, there needed to be some additional strategy to the traditional task.

“As is estimated now, we should be able to serve through the end of May. May 15 is when the application for the Summer Feeding Program is due, so hopefully the state government will support us in doing the same kind of service as now,” Hughes said.

All of the time and energy seems to be paying off, with families accepting hundreds of meals, the program itself is very successful.

“Families have been extremely positive and appreciative,” Superintendent Hughes said, “it is always nice to step out and watch the hand off [of food]. You can see it in their faces: it’s a relief of one of the items we are under stress in.”

Hughes included that the staff involved have also taken the utmost in precaution for safe and secure health practices when it comes to a venture of this magnitude, including conference with health professionals.

“We work collaboratively with nurses, and they’ve been fantastic about ensuring the nutrition staff and para-educators use the healthiest protocol possible,” Hughes said, “we certainly want to make sure that families and staff are treated in a manner that is as safe and secure as possible. We really appreciate that.”

Hughes concluded with his admiration of everyone involved, including the administrators with their support in usage of the facilities that have been utilized in this endeavor.