 All right, so it is time for the afternoon sessions of Big Talk with Small Libraries 2024. I'm your host, Krista Porter for the day, here from the Derasca Library Commission. And starting to the night now, we aren't going to have Katerina and Bailey from the James Hammer Public Library in Virginia talk about their after school meals program, which I think is a really awesome thing that someone retrievably talked about food and security. So this is something that's going on everywhere, having people are dealing with this. So I will just hand it over to you both to tell us all about what you're doing there in Virginia for this. All right, thanks Krista. Have you just been going all day without a break there? I, there have been a few breaks. I've been here all day. Yeah, this is what I do on the day of Big Talk. Great, well, so I'm Katerina Spears, I'm the library director for the James Hall Hammer Public Library and I have Bailey Hughes with me who kind of runs the program day to day. So I'm going to talk about just a little overview about the program and administration of the program. And then Bailey would talk about the actual execution of the program. So we're in Amelia County, Virginia, which is about 35 miles outside of Richmond, Virginia. This is, Amelia has long been a agricultural community. It's very rural, it's very spread out. We're in kind of the nucleus, the courthouse district, where the library is located, our administrative buildings, you know, for people who live in the village, a few businesses and restaurants. And then we have three public schools in the county, an elementary, middle and high school. Those are all within a mile of the library. We also have a small private school in the county, the Amelia Academy, which is like half a mile at that. And then we have a lot of homeschool families in the county. So because we are within, you know, 35 miles of an urban center, a lot of our parents have a long commute morning and evening. And so we have a fair number of kids who come to the library after school, they can walk here, actually some of them get dropped off by the bus here because they get dropped off at the library, they stay for the evening or the afternoon and then their parents pick them up on their way home from work, back into town. One of our sheriff's deputies was telling me yesterday that his daughter gets dropped off here, the school bus and he picks her up on his way home from work. So that is kind of just a snapshot of who we are. And we serve a population of 13,400 in the county. But as I say, we're very spread out. So the immediate downtown areas, it's not anywhere near that, but it's a big rural county. So the first question that occurred to me is whether or not your school, your library is an ideal space for an after school meals program. The way it happened with us here is that our local public school system lost funding. And in order to make cuts, one of the things that they had to cut was after school programming. So an after school meal partner has to be able to provide enriching activities for young people. The kids don't necessarily have to participate in those activities, but they do have to be available. So we're a library, we have books, we have board games, we have video game consoles that people can check out and use while they're on site. So the enrichment piece was already built in, of course, at the school, they would have to have not only people shop running, but they'd have to provide some form of activities for the kids. Our library has a small public meeting room with no tables in there. We can fit about 30 people comfortably or uncomfortably maybe. We already have existing partnerships, she said, hesitantly with our local public school, we'd like them to be stronger. But in this, we saw as an opportunity to create a stronger relationship with our local public schools. So we were enthusiastic about taking on the project because of that. As I mentioned, we already have students who utilize the library during after school hours. Maybe we have parents who bring younger children. And then of course, the teens and tweens who make their way over here on their own to hang out with their friends. Certain times of the year, like when the PV football practice is happening in the field behind the library, we get more kids who were dropping in because either they have a sibling who's participating or they've just finished participating in after school sports right in the neighborhood. Got a rec center across the street. So that brings more kids to our area. And the other bonus of having the after school meal program here rather than the school is that these meals are now accessible to all members of the community. So that includes homeschool families and private school families. It is not restricted. We don't have to do any kind of verification that somebody attends the public school in order to access the meals. It's anybody under 18 or 18 and under. So this program was started in the 90s, which is why the name of it is at risk after school meals. That was terminology that we used back then. And I don't think we most libraries don't use that as much anymore. Back then they used to talk a lot about at risk readers. And I never really was sure what that meant. But so it was originally dubbed it was at risk after school snacks program. So I use at risk, but that is the official title. So this was a program created was designing engaged community partners provide children a safe place to go after school, access nutritious food that allows them to concentrate on homework and join their friends in social and physical activity. So the program is funded by the USDA. It's a component of the child and adult care food program. It is managed by the US Department of Agriculture School Nutrition Service. And so which usually that funding is then passed along to your state Department of Education. And then those funds are distributed to public schools throughout the state, but also private schools. I mean, there are some private schools if they have enough students in the school who qualify financially for free and reduced lunches according to the federal standards for that, which is a family living at 200% of the federal power at or below the federal poverty rate. So I mean, there are some private schools that do qualify for USDA lunches and that will have a school nutrition service funded by the state. But of course, usually we associate it with public schools. So this started as a program in a few select states to provide at risk after school snacks. And that's been available since the 90s, as I said, when this program was named. And then later, the Healthy Hunger Free Kids Act of 2010 expanded the reimbursement for after school meals to all 50 states. So your funding that you're applying for for this program is through the State Department of Education School Nutrition Program. We, at our location, partner with our local public schools to offer this program. It's not necessary. You can register your organization, your library yourself for this program. It's just for us, given our small staff and the fact that the school nutrition program already exists in our county, it made sense to do it in partnership with the school. So if you're a public library or even a private nonprofit bug of 1C3, public library chances are your organization qualifies. The after school program, eligibility is that you're organized to provide care for students after school. We're not really providing supervised care here for kids. If you're 12 and over, you can be in the library under your own power and without supervision. And we do have a provision that allows older siblings to bring in young siblings who are under 12 with them. You need to provide regularly scheduled education enrichment activities. As I said, the students are not required to participate as long as the activities are available. In our case, and Bailey will talk more about this, but that's sometimes we just put like a deck of UNO cards and a couple of board games in the room where they eat. So we are sometimes offering after school programs, but for the most part, it's passive programming. It's word searches and craft packets and things like that. And you need to be located in an attendance area of school where at least 50% of children are eligible for free or reduced price meals. So again, that's 200% or below the federal poverty level. Amelia County definitely qualifies for that. We actually have a higher rate of low income school children or children who come from low income families than the overall population. So while the overall population of the county is I think like 43% living at 200% or below the federal poverty level, within the school that climbs, that percentage climbs much higher. So the school is applying based on their population. So you can localize it. It doesn't just have to be your county, it could be a smaller portion through census blocks that you're doing that. Organizational eligibility, public agencies, right? Such as we are or tax exempt if you're a nonprofit organization library and even some for-profit daycare centers meet those eligibility requirements. So I have down there at the bottom the resources and we'll happily share all of this later for anyone who's interested, the handbook that goes through all the eligibility requirements. And so program administration, as I said, we partner with our local public school nutrition program to offer this. And that quotation, the application process being fairly painless. That was a quote from our, the gentleman who manages our school nutrition program is also the finance director for the school, to partner schools. And so he actually filled out the application for us and said it was no big deal. The administrative time he said for the school is nothing extra if a school nutrition program already exists. And the cost for the school is neutral to profitable, meaning that if you've already got a school nutrition program in place, you're already working with an outside contractor or you're employing people to work in your lunchrooms. So the way that it works here, the staff at the school service, both breakfast and lunch to the students. And then the afternoon, right before school closes, they prepare the snacks, they drive them over here, drop them off for us right after school. And then shortly after that, we start serving them. So the USDA or the State Department of Education reimburses the school for the cost of the meals, but then also for a portion of the cost of paying the folks who prepare those meals. So that means that in some cases, the school actually makes a little bit of a profit on the program. For your facility, you would need to provide a certificate of occupancy, which we didn't even have when our county is so small that you went across the street to our building permit person and told him we didn't have one and he just kind of put one together right then. We also are so small. We don't have a fire marshal in our county. We only have a volunteer fire squad. And so we asked a fire marshal from a neighboring county to come over and do a fire inspection for us and get us certified. So we had to do both of those things when we started this program. And one of the things I'll say so by the gentleman we work with at the public schools is that since librarians are natural record keepers, it makes reporting so much easier for him because there is, as you'll see when Bailey's talking, a fair amount of record keeping we do. Periodically, the school, the program administrators at the school have to come and observe to make sure that we're following the regulations. We do have USCI guidelines for all of those things. The sign that you see on this slide is one of the signs that were required to post that we meet USDA nutrition standards, the two if you need to make a request because you've got a food allergy or dietary restrictions that those needs can be met and there's contact information so that you hope someone to whom you can complain if there was a problem. So that's one of the posts that noticed that I think we also have to have basically non-discrimination in a posting saying that we don't discriminate against anyone who comes in seeking a meal. And that is pretty much it for me. So I'm gonna slide over and let Bailey come in here and talk about the actual day-to-day for the program. All right, literally slide over. Hi, my name's Bailey Hughes. I am, like she said, one of the librarians here and I'm kind of the boots on the ground for this. So that's kind of what I'll be talking about. So how often do we offer this? We do Tuesday, Wednesdays and Thursdays and we offer food from four to 5.30 p.m. That is 5.30 is the last time we'll hand out food but the room is available for the program until six. So we don't kick them out at 5.30. We might kick them out at six because we do typically have programs at six or we close at six. And we chose these times because it's when we see the most teenagers. This is between school letting out and when parks and rec activities actually start. So this is not required by anyone. These are just times that we picked and we're gonna continue this program over summer but we're right now in the process of discussing when that will be, when we can best serve our community. So staff training is really, really simple. All six staff members are now trained and we actually just set up a new schedule where we're all gonna be rotating shifts. And really, I mean, it ends up being, you're doing this once every other week. So it's really not a big commitment on individual parts. Training doesn't take long like I said and after we were initially trained by the school representative, we can now train each other. So it's all in-house after that. The important stuff staff should know is how to set up and clean up, how to answer questions accurately pertaining to the program. And like I'll go over record the stats and fill the forms out accurately. I came up with like a checklist. So that way, if a staff member goes to set up and clean up and there's also some questions, like frequently asked questions on there. So there's like a physical form that each staff member can go through and check off if they're not completely comfortable. But training is super easy. Keeping stats. So like she said, like Kat said, stats are really important. And in the past, the school has had problems keeping up with all these stats. So librarians are good record keepers. So we're pretty meticulous about this. The form you see in the top left is from the school nutrition program. Like that is a USDA form. I think everything else is something that we have created. So the daily meal count and attendance form, it tracks weekly delivery times and how many were delivered, which again will be up to how much you see that your community needs it and uses it. We record how many students ate and how many students used the space to not eat. So that's how many students actually took a meal and sometimes we have tutors come in with students. So we'll record the tutor there and the students who actually ate versus the tutor who can't get the meals, but we'll still record that. And then I take this document upload it every time, every day to a shared Google Drive folder. So the representative from the public schools can see it as well. So it's an easy way for everyone to see the stats. Allergies and dietary restrictions. Any new student that we see who is 13 and up, we ask them if they have an allergy or dietary restriction. And then we record it on the page that you see below the daily meal count form. And anyone who is 12 or younger should have a parent or guardian with them, we'll ask them and keep stats for that as well. And then we report these back to the representative at the Emilia County Public Schools so that they can accommodate in the future. And the biggest one that we've really seen is lactose intolerance, which is really common, but other than that, we haven't come up with a real issue. And since we're working through the schools, at least for the students who are enrolled in public schools, they would know if there was like a severe one like peanut allergy, which again, we have not run across yet. Keeping more stats. These are a couple more that I actually designed. Sign-in sheets, the biggest one, students 13 and up, they've gotten really good at just walking up, signing their name and taking their food. 12 and younger, we see fewer of, but we do see them. And they have a parent actually sign that and fill out that. And that's to ensure their safety and make sure that someone is there who is responsible for them. And that follows our library policy. It also helps us track ages of the people who are actually using the program. And it's a good backup stat for how many people come in so we can have a backup for the daily meal count in this form. Just to make sure we're keeping very accurate stats. And something we're really proud of is we make sure that none of this food goes to waste. It's kind of hard to, I guess, predict how many students you're gonna have every given week. Our numbers can range all over the place. Sometimes we run out during the week and we have to contact the schools again. And then sometimes like this form, we had 19 meals left over, which is pretty extreme actually. So we never want to waste anything. So we, every week, take these leftovers to our friends at the Amelia Food Pantry. So if you decide to start this program, you could find somewhere to actually take this. And then on the right, I do have, yeah, one of our deliveries for the food pantry. And then the form you see is another thing that I upload to the shared Google Drive folder. And it is just a record again so the schools can see how many meals we're taking each week. All right, so what's it really like? You know, we can talk about the procedures all day, but I do wanna say it is a big commitment and it can definitely be a big commitment for small libraries and for small staff members, but it does make a really, really big impact. And obvious reasons why it covers food insecurity. So we know that students don't socialize as well. They don't learn as well. Just their life can be so much more improved when you cover that food security. Students have a place to go after school. Library is already a place to go after school, but this gives them more encouragement to come hang out with us where there are much worse places that they could be. And then you get to know your patrons. I'm now on a first name basis with a lot of these students that otherwise I probably wouldn't get to know. I mean, when you add free food into the equation, you're gonna see patrons come in a lot more or patrons that wouldn't normally come in. And it's good PR for the library and the public school system. We get a lot of people asking like, well, what are you doing out here? And the first thing we say is, well, we've partnered up with the public schools. So it's good PR for both sides. And Kat mentioned earlier, you grow your relationship with the public schools. Sometimes it's hard to get an end in the public schools and this lets them know we're here and we're reliable and we have a contact person. And that is it. And here is our emails and our phone number if you wanna reach out for more questions. Okay. Thank you so much, Katerina Bailey. A much shorter session. That's cool. So anybody has, if anyone has any questions, get them typed into the questions section. So we have plenty of time here to answer all the questions. We'll leave that slide up there with your contact info for the library of yourself. So people have that if they need. As I said at the beginning, this was one of the sessions I was looking forward to. This is definitely something that everyone in the country, big or small, is dealing with is food insecurity. And it's great that there is the funding and these plant programs available somewhere, everywhere, anywhere for people to have access to it. All right. So we do have some questions coming in here. Let's see. All right. Can you talk about the actual food that comes? Like how is it, how does it come? Has it packaged? Do you need any sort of like an actual full kitchen facility at the library to handle or deal with any of the food or I get like, you know, sink, refrigerator? Yeah. So all that we need here is basically a big enough refrigerator to keep this. This isn't, you know, something that the USDA provides but the schools actually bring them in these big insulated bags and then we just throw them in our staff fridge. And it does take up a big portion of our staff fridge but luckily we do have the space for that. I would recommend having a microwave too. We don't have one currently but that would be a good thing to reheat food. So the requirements for the bags, they have to have and correct me if, you know I missed something, a fruit, a vegetable, a carb and then a drink with it and normally it's like milk and they prepackage these bags for us. So, you know, we do no food handling it's all the public schools who bring it over. We just store them until then but a lot of times what we see is a sandwich, sometimes there's chips, sometimes there's carrots and celery, it's stuff that you would expect from a school. Yeah. And I will say there's, there's certain requirements that are part of the training like the kids are required to consume part of the food onsite but not all of the food onsite. So they have to believe is it eat the sandwich here but they can take the fruit. Well, they can take either a fruit or a carb and for sandwiches that does fall under carb. It's a little, you know, gray area but it would also be like a dinner roll or chips but they can also take the apple or the, you know I think we've seen like kiwis and plums so they can take any of that with them or they could not take the entire meal with them. Yeah. And there was, you know, they give us some variety. Sometimes we have, you know we always have PB and J for the kind of picky eaters but sometimes they give us ham sandwiches sometimes they give us a cold pizza sometimes the spicy chicken sandwiches were very popular for a while. So it just depends on what your school nutrition folks or if you were to do a program like this undertake this on your own without partnership for the schools, whatever the food contractor is providing as long as, and they, you know the USDA standards are part of that overall training guide let's say in the at risk after school meals guide that I had earlier in the presentation. So. All right. You definitely need to work with someone else someone else who would provide, you know prepare and put together the food. So the, I won't go to myself with the question about how did, do librarians need to get like a food handler's license or permit or anything but since you're not actually doing anything you don't have to worry about that. Right. I mean, you can work with a local food contractor, I mean some kind of a catering company or something like that. As long as they are, you know matching the USDA requirements for the meals to have all the different components like Bailey was saying for a vegetable, you know like we almost always get carrots for them as their vegetable, which we found very quickly they would only eat if they had ranch dressing. So we started carrying those little ranch dressing you know, sashes so that they could eat their carrots. Okay, great. And that was like that was a lot of the questions. Let's see. I've got other ones here that I got to go through. Oh, something else I was going to mention. Sorry about that question with the is that the school told us that if we wanted a new refrigerator, they could purchase it for us or if we needed equipment of any kind that they can get reimbursed for it through the USDA. So if you only have, you know a mini fridge in your library and you need to acquire a bigger refrigerator or replace your existing one because it's old or something like that that is something that the USDA will reimburse for. Nice, that's well, yeah if they're providing food through their program that makes sense. I wonder about if the microwave you're talking about you said they provide cold pizza sometimes. I know some people, depending on what the toppings are I'm a ball about cold pizza. But some kids might not be. Yeah, I think that does kind of open you up to if you're if you're heating the food and it's one of the reasons we haven't done it here yet according to the school nutrition is that we would have to get some additional training for food handling, which I've had before when I worked in a restaurant I had food handlers license and it's just basic things like knowing what temperature to heat things to and what temperature to store things. And so if you were going to actually be heating the food on site you'd need to take that extra step and that's just something we haven't done yet because it's already a lot for a small staff. So sure, sure. So there's a mixture of options every day not just every, on Tuesday everyone's getting a ham sandwich there's multiple kids have a choice. Yeah, so they do provide us with choices at least two choices every time sometimes three but we always get PB and J's which is a good vegetarian option. And then we usually get, she mentioned cold pizza or they'll do turkey or ham wraps. We've had spicy chicken sandwiches but like I said, there's either two or three options that they can have and everything else in those kits are the same it's just that one main carb or sandwich. Yeah, and once somebody identifies a dietary restriction like lactose intolerance we just request, I think we had a carton of oatmeal here for a while because there was a child that was lactose intolerant or that's what that form is for. If we report things then they start making sure that a meal is provided to accommodate those dietary restrictions. And if anyone wants to start this kind of program I came up with most of those forms I'm more than happy to share those with you. Great, yeah, absolutely. And your contact info is in the slides which will be available afterwards, so perfect. And you mentioned having a small staff someone wants to know how many staff members do you have? And I don't want to mention it. We have six, one is part time but they are all trained to do this program as well. And like I said, we're all going to be doing it soon. Yeah, on our staff we have Bailey and I are considered the program managers I think because we got training directly from the school which was I think 30 or 45 minutes that we sat with the school nutrition officer and he walked us through things like the diversity, equity and inclusion, the food safety, keeping the statistics and how to do that. And then after the 45 minutes that we spent with him we are now qualified to train anybody on our staff because we're considered program managers for this. So he's the overall program administrator overseeing all the communication with USDA, ordering the meals, filing all the paperwork and then we're the onsite managers for the program. Okay, let's just go up the top here. There's a question. I think it's something that I had wondered about. Have you received any pushback regarding sharing of files from parents? Allergies make me think about HIPAA. I was wondering about that too about privacy issues with the Children's Info. You said you have them sign in. How are you dealing with all of that with privacy and allergies and HIPAA? And do you keep those sign-in sheets or are they destroyed afterwards for your typical library privacy issues? Yeah, so when I made those forms I made sure that the kid's name is not associated with it. And even when they're signing in like the 13 and up I don't require them to put their last name and the allergy form itself, do you know where that guy is? Yeah, so it just says the type and the date that we receive this information and whether or not we were able to give them what they needed that day. So I don't actually associate that with the name. You had the issue just that there was. Right, yeah. No personally identifying information is actually there. Right, yeah. So it's mostly that if you're consistently not meeting a need in the community that's what this form is about that you're consistently turning people away because you're not providing oatmeal or because you're not providing vegetarian options then it's a red flag for the State Department of Education and they'll, cause all this of course gets reported to them and so they're gonna come to you and say, well, you know, why aren't you making an effort to if you've had to turn people away on all these dates? So that's the main reason for that tracking. It's not to track the individual because somebody could come in one day, request oatmeal and then never come back but after that we're carrying oatmeal, right? Thank you. Yeah. Yeah, it's totally a drop in program. It's not, you know, we're not verifying even though a lot of the kids who are taking advantage of this program aren't necessarily kids who are qualified financially for free and reduced lunches at school but that doesn't matter to us. Anybody who is 18 or under and that's 18 if you're, you know, you started you're still in your senior year of high school or something, but anyone 18 and under can walk in here and request a meal and get it for free. Right, so there's no requirements. Yeah. All right, so let's see, next up. Do you or the school have to apply for this program annually or is it just a one time thing and it keeps going, how does that work for each year? We've already qualified as a facility so we won't have to do that again. It's just, you know, he will resubmit basically the financial request, but no, we won't have to be re-registered as an institution. We're on the books as one. So the summer program is actually, because we will do summer meals, we'll transition at the end of the school year to doing summer meals, we're probably gonna do them at lunchtime. You know, the Parks and Rec has a day camp across the street so they can bring the kids over here for free meals. That's a totally separate pot of money. So he'll apply for that separately because all of these programs are kind of siloed in financial ways. And so he'll apply for that separately and we'll have to, this will be our first time being a facility for summer meals. So we'll have to go through this again for the summer meals, but for the after-school meals, no. He'll just reapply for funding in the fall like they do every year. Okay. And I think this might really, another question someone has that you only do it three days a week. Is that part of the funding restriction or did you just, how did you come up with doing that? And do you have the option for which days or how many? How did you come upon doing those particular days? I don't know. You want to take that one? Yeah. So no, there is not a restriction on how often you just have to work with your public schools and you have to work with what you've got at your library. So we restricted it to three days a week for that amount of time because again, it's when we saw the most teenagers. And again, it kind of landed in a good spot where we thought we could feed the most people without interrupting school or interrupting after-school activities at Parks and Rec particularly. Let's see. It's also our only program in meeting space in the library. So since we have to have a dedicated space and your dedicated space can be a table in your library where they eat. But it doesn't have to be a separate room but for our purposes, if you have 15 kids coming by to eat after-school meals, we don't really want them to necessarily do that in the main part of the library. And our meeting and event space, our program space, that one little room is just in constant demand. So we have regular programs that utilize that space on the other days. But yeah. So this I think if we were trying to do it five days a week might be a little too overwhelming for the staff. So I mean, you can offer it one day a week. If you're open late one evening or you have a lot of family activities on a specific day of the week, where you have drop-in homework help or something like that, you can schedule this program to just be part of that program and not do it the rest of the week. So yeah, tailor it to what works for your library and what's going on in your library, absolutely. Absolutely, yeah. We are actually closed on Mondays and Friday we have a reoccurring club that we already had during that time, which is why it was restricted to those three days. But it does three days, I think is really adequate for the students that we see. Are you still gonna do the three days for summer or are you changing that up at all? I think we're gonna continue three days, but again, we're actually meeting next week to talk with the school representative and then we'll work it out with him. Let's see, someone wants to know how many students can you support in the program and have you ever turned a student away? And I assume- You've not had a trouble running out away. There has been a couple of times where we run out of food in the middle of the week. So we actually talked to the school representative and we upped that number. So now we get 25 meals a week and that usually covers it for the whole week. Other than that, no, we have never had to turn a student away. There was, when the student came in with a lactose intolerance, we did tell him just to avoid the milk and he was able to eat the rest of the meal. Like she said, we can comfortably hold 30 people in that room, but it's never reached that before. Yeah, during football, the Pee Wee football and they practice on the field out behind the library in the fall, we were doing sometimes 15 kids in an afternoon doing meals. So it really fluctuates during the course of the school year based on what's happening in the community, what the kids are up to. Some days we only have four kids, some days we have 15, it really just depends. But the fact that they've learned to rely on this and you can see the difference in their behavior, right? Like the other option that they have, the only other store in our little food desert of a downtown here is the Dollar General. The kids walk there after school, they buy two liter bottles of soda and a giant bag of gummy worms and then they come and sit in the library and it's just a bit much. But if they come in and they have a sandwich and some carrots and a cup of milk, it's a totally different set of kids. Absolutely. All right, we got a bunch more questions here, we got plenty of time to answer them all. So, all right, we'll go to this one. Someone wants to know if, let's just, okay, let's take this one here. And I don't know if you maybe describe this in the beginning more, what made the partnership happen? Our local school has hosted summer meals in the past and is just curious about the benefits of the partnership to the library. Obviously for the after school meals, the school's done for the day, so that would be why. So basically how did this all end up coming about? Amazing, it brings kids to the library or they were coming there anyways. Well, they were coming here anyway, but what happened was our public schools lost some funding. Their budget was cut and where they figured out that they could save some money with cutting this after school program because they had to provide staffing for it, because they had to provide some kind of activities that could just put the kids in the lunch room and forget about them. And so there was also, I'm sure it's safe to say that nobody in Amelia is listening, there was, you know, I think some desire on the part of the school to, you know, elevate their brand a little bit, you know, and make it, you know, because if it's happening inside the school, it's not really obvious to everybody in the community, unless you have a kid who participates in the after school meal program. If it's happening in the public library where everybody comes and goes and sees that this program is available and that it's done in partnership between the school and the library, that's a really good, you know, public relations message that we're putting out. And the other benefit, of course, was moving it out of the public school and here to the library is that now this program is available for homeschool families, which we have a lot of in the county, and it's available to kids who attend the small private school just up the street from the library. So that, I don't know that they, you know, you would turn someone, a homeschool family, away who showed up at the school, but it wouldn't be a natural thing for a homeschool family to show up at the public school looking for an after school meal, whereas here it's open to anyone. So, you know, it makes it a more inclusive program by doing it at the library instead of the school. It saved them some money because they were having to have staff available to stay after school, provide enrichment. So it just made a lot of sense. Definitely. All right, someone wants to know, I'm wondering if anyone has done this without the USDA money, so like with community members donating the food or donating the money? I mean, we did for a while when the, you know, before we got the after school meal program off the ground, we were, you know, giving out snacks in the afternoons and things, but of course, and I mean, it's very rare that most of the kids who are coming here for meals, they're by themselves, they're not with a parent. So I don't know, I mean, I don't know that we would feel comfortable opening ourselves up to that kind of liability with minors. Yeah, and when you're getting donations from the public too, you're always running that extra risk and also potentially not meeting nutrition needs as well. And the USDA definitely covers that. Yeah, and someone else actually commented before this person day, which is kind of interesting because it sort of relates to doing this without USDA money, but someone said that we found regionally that trying to meet USDA standards ourselves rather than having a school do it like you all did, that it was just unfeasible. You've got to keep up the standards, make sure you're doing it right. Those of us who are solo or just part-time staff, it's really something hard to do, but if you've got the USDA funding and backup and someone else to school or like you said, a caterer or somebody doing the hard work, I guess the harder part of getting the food together and meeting the standards, yeah. I don't know that we could even manage this program to the extent that we do without that partnership. I do know that the company that does the food service for the school, I mean, they're not school employees, they're outside contractors. So they, you know, of course, follow whatever the USDA requirements are, but they're not actually school employees. And so they contract with them separately for the preparation of these meals and the delivery of them. I mean, she dropped them off on her way home from work. The kind of food service over there when she leaves work for the day, she swings by here and drops off our food. So yeah, there's definitely a chain of, I guess, communication and we're very lucky to have someone really good at the schools that's ahead of nutrition. So I guess, you know, if you don't have that, that would be a weak point, but we haven't really had any communication issues so far. Yeah, and it's even if it's, you know, only 15 kids during the course of an entire week that come by, you know, the goodwill that it has raised from the community has been invaluable. One of the other things that we do with the Amelia Food Pantry, because when we take the leftover meals to them, they actually break them apart so that all the milk can go to a single family, you know, especially if it's a family that's like living out of a motel or something like that, the single serve milks really come in handy for someone like that. You know, if there's like a piece of fruit in each meal, they'll pull those and make like a larger bag of fruit so that they can give to a couple of different families or something like that, but we advertise through the food pantry as well. So I just went out there today to deliver our leftover meals. I took a stack of our after-school meals, liar. There it is. And so I take those out to the food pantry periodically and they give them out, they put them in the boxes of food distributions to all their families so that, you know, to try to raise awareness in the community. And of course, you know, when you're talking about kids, it's fluid, right? You know, kids graduate and move on. And so you've always got new kids coming into the school or, you know, aging into it. And so that constant reminder in their food distribution boxes. And I think she said that this week in our little tiny county, they had 70 families that came in on Tuesday because they do pickups Tuesday and Friday. So they have 70 families come through on Tuesday. That's a huge number for our little tiny county. Yeah, yeah. All right. And that answers like two questions that people got that I knew you'd already mentioned, but I was gonna, have you mentioned again, to be able to ask what did you do with leftover food? Yeah, all those food pantry. Yep. And is that each week? Whatever it is, it's a weekly thing. Yep, I go out every Friday. So we also actually have a box in our lobby for food collection for non-perishable items for the food pantry. So I take whatever's in the box. I take the leftover meals. I take flyers for like right now we have an English class going on. And a lot of the families who are accessing the food pantry right now are Spanish speaking. So I take out flyers for our English conversational English class and they help us to promote programs really among the group of people who we are trying so hard to reach, right? The people who need the library most. So it is between the schools, the food pantry and the library. It has been a wonderful strengthening of our relationships. And then once a month, when I go to the Board of County Supervisors meeting, I'm usually mentioning something about our partnership with them or I'll say thank you to the school, to the specific person for continuing to help us administer this program. And so I really try to keep it visible. Great, all right. So it looks like our questions have all been answered that we had come in. I don't see any new ones. Great, and we will happily share with you, Christa, all of these forms that Bailey has created are the ones that we, you know, just so people can see what we've done to organize the record keeping here. You can send it to me or a link to the Google Drive or wherever, however you want to, we will get them linked up to the archive. Okay, great. I should along with the slides, yeah. All right, and if anyone does have any questions and wants to talk to Bailey or Katerina about their program and if you want to one in your area, there is their contact information as well. We just have some comments that did come in saying thanks for this talk so good. And then a wonderful last comment here says, I was hungry often as a child, so a program like this would have been a blessing to me. Thank you on behalf of the hungry children in the community. Thank you so much. Yes, thank you. All right, thank you so much. All right.