By Mollie Bryant
mollie.bryant@amarillo.com
Snack Pak 4 Kids, an initiative to fight childhood hunger among mostly elementary school-age students in the Texas Panhandle, expanded to Austin Middle School in March with its Snack Shak program. Each Friday during the school year, students identified by teachers and counselors as being food insecure receive a backpack filled with snacks to carry them through weekends, when food might be scarce.

Austin principal David Vincent said about 55 students at his school participate in the program, which provides more adult-portioned foods than packages for elementary students, which might include oatmeal or spaghetti and meatballs.

“We felt like students get breakfast and lunch here, but over the weekend, there may not be an adequate supply of food at their homes, so this is a good resource for them,” Vincent said. “We’ve had comments from parents (who) appreciate this, and it makes a difference in the kids is the main thing. If kids are hungry, they can’t learn.”

Austin counselor Tiffany Fisk said distraction is common in kids who do not get enough to eat.

“They have a harder time focusing when they’re hungry,” she said. “That’s something we ask them to do every period, and that’s difficult when they’re feeling sluggish and sleepy.”

Volunteers assemble backpacks filled with food once a week at Covenant Presbyterian Church, and they are delivered to Austin Middle School on Thursday, when the backpacks are placed in students’ lockers to take home with them the next day.

Before the program began, all students at the school were given the WT backpacks that are used to transport the food, enhancing the privacy of students involved.

“Just because you have (a backpack) doesn’t mean you’re on the program,” Snack Pak founder Dyron Howell said. “We don’t know if we’ve fully done it where 100 percent of the students are not identified, but it was the most creative solution we could come up with, and we thought we’d give it a shot.”

Vincent said the approach helps kids make use of the program without being singled out by their peers.

“We want to honor their situation, and we don’t want to make an example of them and point them out, but we also want to meet their needs,” he said.

Snack Pak 4 Kids, which began in September 2010, serves over 3,000 students in 17 school districts in the Texas Panhandle. Shack Pak also has a presence at Travis Middle School and Tascosa High School, Howell said.

According to a survey of about 500 Amarillo Independent School District teachers last year, 78 percent said they saw an improvement in academic performance and 72 percent saw behavior improvements in students involved in the program.

Fisk said students in the Snack Shak program have better attitudes, are more motivated and seem happier to be at school.

http://amarillo.com/news/2013-05-04/snack-pak-4-kids-expands-austin-middle-school

Adults courageously tell their story about hunger they faced as children and how it impacted their lives in a December AGN story.
Like torture:’ Experience spurs woman to fight child
hunger
Posted: December 15, 2012 – 10:04pm
By BRITTANY NUNN
brittany.nunn@amarillo.com
“Hunger … it’s worse than sad. It’s like torture,” Shiloh Stanley said as she stared across the room with a distant look in
her eyes.
Stanley, 34, grew up in a home where money was a constant struggle. From the time she was in first grade, her mom
simply didn’t make enough money waiting tables to provide for the family.
“I remember when weekends came, that eerie feeling of, ‘Oh my goodness, am I going to eat when I get home?’” she
recalled.
Stories like Stanley’s were the reason Dyron Howell and his wife, Kelly, started the Snack Pak 4 Kids program in
September 2010, Howell said.
Snack Pak 4 Kids is a nonprofit weekend backpack program that provides nutritious snacks for students who live in homes
where youngsters at times don’t get enough food for an active, healthy lifestyle.
It began serving 10 children at Will Rogers Elementary School in September 2010. The program has grown to serve more
than 2,400 students in seven school districts: Amarillo, Fritch, Hereford, Tulia, River Road, Walcott and Bushland.
Volunteers pack 10 to 12 nutritious snacks in plastic bags, deliver them to the school, and place them in backpacks to be
discreetly sent home each Friday.
Hunger is far from a new problem in Amarillo, Howell said, but it’s been a silent epidemic. For the first time, some are
stepping forward to tell their stories.
“And that takes a lot of courage,” Howell said, “and each generation needs to hear this story from their perspective, rather
than a perspective they can’t relate to.”
To Stanley, hunger was going outside to play in order to distract herself from how hungry she was; it was eating whatever
scraps she could find in the pantry or get from a friend; it was going to bed on Sunday nights in pain, aching for Monday
morning, when she would get breakfast at school.
Now 35, Stanley lives the life little girls dream of, with a house in a nice neighborhood, a happy marriage to her high
school sweetheart, two beautiful daughters and a business she helps her husband run.
But she said she’s never forgotten what it means to be helplessly hungry, and she was shocked to learn there are thousands
of children in Amarillo whose childhoods mirror her own.
One in three children in the Texas Panhandle live in homes without adequate access to healthy, nutritious food, according
to reports by Feeding America. Nationwide, 16 percent of households face this problem and in Texas, 18 percent of
households are “food­insecure,” the report said.
It’s hard to grasp the enormity of child hunger, Stanley said, because no one would guess that the child sitting beside their
child at school is hungry.
“I was good at putting a smile on my face and, you know, life is good. I wouldn’t tell anyone anything that was going on. I
was good at covering it up, and no one would have ever known what I dealt with when I went home,” she said.
When Shannon Gonzales glanced down at her daughter, Nevaeh, her eyes filled with tears.
“You want your child to have everything,” she said quietly, in a voice thick with emotion. “Knowing that you can’t feed your
own little baby because you can’t afford to, that’s the hardest thing.”
Gonzales became homeless in April 2009 and moved into a homeless shelter.
She did everything “right.” She was going to school for accounting, had a part­time job, and eventually moved out of the
shelter into an apartment, but between rent, bills, child care, gas and other necessities, it was hard for her to stretch her
single income to cover groceries.
For her, hunger meant lying awake at night wondering how she was going to stretch $10 into a week’s worth of food; it
meant sending Nevaeh to school irritable and sluggish; it meant wandering down aisles at the grocery store, bypassing fruit
and vegetables to fill her cart with boxes of virtually nutritionless instant noodles.
She remembers Neveah struggling at school. Her daughter had no energy, and her grades were failing because she wasn’t
able to concentrate in the classroom.
Gonzales also noticed behavioral problems. The once­happy girl was often irritable and snappy with teachers and
classmates.
“Shannon has lived this as a mom, as a single­parent mom, as someone who has been homeless, as someone who has
struggled,” Howell said.
“And for the single­parent moms, and also the single­parent fathers, her story resonates with them because she doesn’t tell
it from a perspective of judging others for a situation they are in; it’s, ‘This is the reality. However, I didn’t let that be the
end of my story.’”
Gonzales is in a better place now. She got promoted and is able to provide for herself and her daughter without the Snack
Pak program.
“I remember there was moments when I thought I wouldn’t be able to do it,” she said. “I see a bright future. We’re no
longer on the program, but when I hear stories, and when I see Snack Pak 4 Kids, I smile because I know that program is
making a difference.”
Alvin Sharp, 72, is a father, a husband, and a self­made millionaire as the founder of Sharp Dealership in Amarillo. He,
too, has known hunger.
Growing up, sometimes things were OK, Sharp explained. When his dad was sober and was able to work, things were
better — not great, but better.
Sharp’s mother, he said, was the only thing that held the family of seven together. She worked long hours at a laundry
facility, trying to make enough to pay the bills and put food on the table, but the money didn’t always stretch far enough.
“Sometimes you had food, and it seemed like other times you just get what you could find,” he said. “You know, we was
always just scrounging around.”
To him, hunger was standing in line at Salvation Army, ashamed; it was searching for bottles and cans to trade for nickels
and dimes.
“I guess you just felt like there was something wrong with you. You wasn’t proud, I can tell you that. You just felt a little
ashamed, you know?” Sharp said quietly.
Sharp represents an important part of the Snack Pak program, Howell said.
“You’ve got a 72­year­old man who went through this at a different time,” Howell said.
“He’s successful in business, and he’s successful in the community, but he doesn’t have the mind­set that because he is now
successful, the kids today don’t deserve some help. He’s quite the opposite actually — very motivated and convicted to
remove the barrier that he had, even though he made it.
“That was why he came forward to tell his story, because he doesn’t have to tell his story, but he felt so convicted to give a
voice to kids,” Howell said.
Sharp’s daughter, Jana Toliver, said when she was growing up, her father didn’t often talk about his childhood, but she
picked up on things over the years.
It wasn’t until Toliver became a teacher that she began to truly understand the depth of her father’s childhood struggle.
“It never occurred to me they didn’t have food to eat,” she said.
When she started seeing the students in her classroom struggle through schoolwork after a weekend with little to no food,
she began to understand the extent of poverty. She eventually realized she was witnessing the same lifestyle her own father
had grown up in.
Linda Vaughn has a similar story. Vaughn has lived on “both sides of the tracks,” she said.
“I’ve lived on the very poor side — not even poor, we were ‘po’ — to the very affluent side because my foster mother was a
schoolteacher,” she said.
Linda learned at a young age that education was the only way she could make a better her life for herself. Now, as the
principal on Johnny Allen 6th Grade Campus, she passes that same important lesson on to her students.
To Linda, hunger is the retelling of memories from her childhood, but it’s also a reality she witnesses daily in the halls of
her own school. Because of her own past, she knows what to look for.
Aside from the tell­tale signs — children who are irritable, sluggish and unable to focus on their studies; students who
make frequent trips to the nurse’s office for stomach aches; kids who stuff their pockets with food to bring home to their
younger siblings — identifying hunger is like a sixth sense to Vaughn.
“You can just see it in their eyes,” she said. “You know. You just know instantly, this kid does not have enough to eat.”
Vaughn, Sharp, Toliver, Stanley and Gonzales all think programs like Snack Pak 4 Kids provide more than just food for
kids; they provide hope.
“I’m a big believer in Snack Pak 4 Kids,” Stanley said. “It’s going to have a huge impact; it already has, but it’s going to
have an even bigger impact on our community’s kids. I’m excited about seeing what else happens with it. I really feel like
it could change so many kids’ lives, and their futures.”
For more information about the Snak Pak 4 Kids program, visit snackpak4kids.org.

Success Story:”The food we received is a miracle.” said a second grader about the extra food they received at Thanksgiving.

Success Story: I had a student return after the Thanksgiving break so excited. He stopped to tell me that they had enough to eat over the break because they had their snacks. Thank you for all you do for our students.

Success Story: I have 3 kids on snack pak who are homeless. Mom and the 3 kids are living with a friend. Mom works as a waitress and depends heavily on her tips. She told me there are times when she doesn’t have enough money to buy food. Thanks to snack paks these children will always have something to eat!

Success Story: We have a family that is living in a nearby motel to our school. The oldest child reported to us that this food is the only food they have for the weekend when their mom is at work. The student reported that it makes her and her siblings happy to have this food.

Success Story: Last week one of our first graders told his teacher at the beginning of the day “I’m so happy it’s Friday because I get a bag of snacks to take home” I think for a 6 year old to be thinking about snacks at 8:00 in the morning is a clear indication that he really needs a snack pack.

Success Story: We had a child that had been living with his mom and siblings at his grandmother’s house and had been “kicked out” and had to find somewhere else to live. I know that the food came just at the right time as the family was riding around in the car that Friday trying to find a place to live before nightfall.

Success Story: One of our families with 5 children attending school here are dealing with dad’s terminal cancer. He continues to try to work but is unable to many days due to intense pain and nausea. Mom has to stay home to tend to him and children too young for school. They are struggling to pay bills. Snack Paks provide these children food on the weekends so there is one less thing for the parents and children to deal with.

Success Story: Snack Pak has blessed one of my students this school year. This student is at-risk and provided with several interventions which help him to succeed with the third grade content. I consider Snack Pak an indispensable intervention for this child because it provides him with both physical and emotional stability. The distraction and anxiety of not knowing what is at home to eat would prevent him from social and academic success. With the help of Snack Pak, he can focus on school without the fear that his belly will be empty. Additionally, Snack Pak prevents him from the physical pain caused by hunger. This child has demonstrated astounding progress in both reading and math in the last two months. I am certain, that this would not have happened if it weren’t for the nourishment he is given over the weekend from Snack Pak.

Mrs. C 3rd Grade Teacher