SnackPak 4 Kids

Snack Pak Expands to Austin Middle School

admin — Sun, 05 May 2013 16:38:17 +0000

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

“Who is being nice to me?”

admin — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 13:16:53 +0000

Snack Pak makes an impact over Spring Break in Pampa: “The week before Spring Break we hand out two sacks to each student. A 2nd grader was confused about why he was getting a bag of food on Thursday. He was worried that the food was for someone else. His teacher explained that because of Spring Break he would be getting a bag of food on Thursday AND on Friday. In a very quiet voice , he asked his teacher, “Who is being so nice to me?”

Dalhart Rotary Dollar 4 Dollar Food Drive to Benefit Snack Pak 4 Kids

dalhart — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 20:46:53 +0000

The Dalhart Rotary Club will be conducting a food drive benefiting the local Snack Pak 4 Kids program at the Dalhart United Supermarket on Saturday February 2^nd from 10:00 am to 3:00 pm. All food donations received that day will be matched by the Dalhart Rotary Club. Our goal is to reach $1,000 in food donations that will be used in weekend snack packs for local students. Currently the programs is serving approximately 80 Dalhart students each week. The mission of Snack Pack 4 Kids is to end weekend hunger for children living in the Dalhart by providing a backpack filled with kid friendly snacks each Friday of the school year. So we invited everyone to come help us reach our goal of $1,000 in food donations for our local program. To learn more about Snack Pack 4 Kids, visit their website at www.snackpack4kids.org and come join the Dalhart Rotary Club we put “Service Above Self” to provide healthy snacks for the hungry kids of Dalhart.

Adults Share Their Stories about Hunger as Kids

admin — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 14:10:15 +0000

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.

Snack Pak Makes a Difference

admin — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 14:05:15 +0000

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.

Snack Pak Helps Student

admin — Sat, 10 Nov 2012 04:26:23 +0000

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

Students Create Snack Pak Logo

admin — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 05:37:06 +0000

Amarillo Area Center for Advanced Learning (AACAL)graphic design class created the new Snack Pak logo.
Students build logos for local firms
Oct 24, 2012

By JACOB MAYER

jacob.mayer@amarillo.com

When Snack Pak 4 Kids founder Dyron Howell decided his organization needed a new logo, he explored options with several design companies, but turned to high school students for a solution.

Howell contacted Amarillo Area Center for Advanced Learning graphic design teacher Tammy Newsom in September to develop a new logo, but the project turned into a chance for students to gain valuable experience beyond what Howell and Newsom first imagined.

“I was shocked,” Newsom said. “I thought, ‘What a great opportunity for my students to actually gain real-world experience, to see it from
beginning to end, that their work does have meaning and value.’”

Howell said he and his wife started the Snack Pak 4 Kids program two years ago, providing sacks of food for local at-risk students every weekend.

The students built their logo designs, and graphic designers visited the class to offer critiques, Newsom said.

More than 20 students presented their designs to Howell and the designers to learn how to work with clients, Newsom said.

That’s an aspect of the lesson Newsom wouldn’t have been able to provide otherwise, she said.

“It reinforces what I’ve been teaching them,” Newsom said. “It’s not all about what you want; it’s about what your client wants.”

The feedback also was an eye-opening experience for Logan Bryant, 16, a junior at AACAL and Amarillo High School.

“I wasn’t prepared for the critiquing,” Bryant said. “I wasn’t ready for what they had to say. You have to be a little emotionless when that happens.”

Bryant said he expects those learning moments, combined with the technical skills he is learning, to help him as he enters the workforce.

“Experience will blow anyone out of the water,” he said. “No matter how young you are, if you have experience they are more likely to choose you. This is really, really helpful.”

The chance to build the logo for Snack Pak 4 Kids was particularly meaningful for Kayla Bolin, 17, a junior at AACAL and Amarillo High. Bolin said she previously volunteered with the organization and saw how it helped students who need food for weekends.

“Creating a logo for them, whether or not they chose mine, was still a lot of fun,” Bolin said. “I liked being able to give back to an organization that gives to the community so much.”

Howell said the organization now works in 14 school districts throughout the Panhandle and helps feed more than 3,000 children.

The organization plans to use a logo created by Jasmine Uy, 16, a junior at AACAL and Amarillo High, Howell said.

Uy said she enjoyed working on the project, but she didn’t start with one idea she knew would work.

“I had a lot of trouble at first trying to come up with something,” Uy said. “I played around with 12, 13 or maybe more ideas. I just tried doing them all and it led to the one that they chose.”

Uy said she was nervous when she first presented her design to Howell and the professional designers, but their feedback helped her create a better logo and gave her the confidence to work on future projects.

Uy said she will work with designers John Chaka and Jerry Bergeron at “redcap,” an Amarillo design studio, to refine her logo.

Designers also will also mentor her for the remainder of the school year as part of AACAL’s mentoring program, Bergeron said.

“It’s rewarding and inspiring to see the level expertise and creativity that they have at that age,” Bergeron said. “If we can apply some real-life application to their experience and their work, it’s a win-win.”

The students’ next project is to design a logo for Urban Envy, a mobile boutique, Newsom said.

Whether or not the students pursue a career in graphic design, Newsom said she hopes lessons from this class help students interact professionally, as well as have technical design skills they can use later in life.

“I want to develop their creativity, to be able to see the design concepts,” Newsom said. “I want them to be able to actually recognize (the design concepts) and for them to think outside the box, to not allow us to stuff their creativity.”

For Howell, the Snack Pak 4 Kids project evolved from the need for a new logo into a chance for students to support an organization that helps other students.

“There’s nothing better than kids helping kids,” Howell said. “As adults, we try to solve problems and we think we know the best solutions, but we have involved kids since we started this program, and it’s been amazing. … They can see things in such a different way than we do.”

Hungry children ‘can’t learn anything’-Front page Amarillo Globe News Story

admin — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 04:34:04 +0000

Teachers say weekend food aids student behavior, academics
By BRITTANY NUNN September 24, 2012
Joe Barton leaned forward to emphasize a point about the vicious cycle of poverty and its key side effect, hunger.

“You cannot ask a child who is starving — you cannot ask a human being, doesn’t even have to be a child — you cannot ask a human being who is in a literal state of survival to be at their best,” said Barton, an Amarillo licensed professional counselor.

People lacking one or more of the basic components of survival — food, shelter or clothing — become preoccupied with how they can attain it, and quickly, he said. And that preoccupation makes it difficult to succeed in areas such as analytical thinking, long-term planning and creativity, Barton said.

That’s a problem the Snack Pak 4 Kids program began targeting two years ago, providing sacks of food for local at-risk students every weekend. A recent survey of almost 500 Amarillo Independent School District teachers in 32 schools indicates the program is working, officials said.

Overwhelming majorities of respondents to the survey observed Snack Pak students improving in a wide range of categories, ranging from behavior to performance.

“We’ve had a great success,” said Brandy Self, the principal at Glenwood Elementary School. “Kids would come to us on Monday tired, grouchy, so hungry sometimes, and it took a little while to get them to eat, to get them back on track.”

More than three-fourths of teachers said Snack Pak students beefed up their academic performance and concentration.

“These numbers … validate what we’ve been saying all along: ‘On an empty stomach, you can’t learn anything,’” said Dyron Howell, the founder of Snack Pak 4 Kids in Amarillo.

Barton is not surprised.

“You give kids proper nutrition, and they’re absolutely going to perform better in school,” he said.

The survey is not scientific, said Barton, who has a master’s degree in psychology and is pursuing a doctorate in clinical psychology. But it echoes what researchers already have learned about nutrition and human development.

“While we don’t have proof that this is causative — we don’t have scientific proof that the Snack Pak 4 Kids program is the reason for the improvement the teachers are seeing — what we do have is some really strong evidence, some support that that may be the case,” he said.

It’s not just about academics. Almost three-fourths of respondents said Snack Pak students’ behavior also improved. Good nutrition not only meets physical needs, it provides emotional security, Barton said.

“When it comes to human development, one of the best things that you can give children is predictability,” Barton said.

Without that, children mentally cope in what Barton called “survival mode.” Immediate needs become the primary focus and higher thinking becomes almost impossible, he said.

Barton cited as an example someone going three days without water:

“If you say to me, ‘Well, Joe, I’ll give you 10 gallons of water once you can give me a clear concise, bright conversation about the intellectual and psychological underpinnings of thirst,’” Barton said with thick sarcasm. “I’m going to say, ‘I can’t do it.’ I’ve gone three days without water. All I can focus on is getting that water.”

That’s the kind of impact Howell said he began working to reverse when he discovered Amarillo lacked a weekend backpack program like those found elsewhere in Texas, such as Food 4 Kids in Dallas, Backpack Buddy in Houston and Food in Tummies in Austin.

So Howell began meeting with AISD principals to discuss hunger. Finally, he founded Snack Pak 4 Kids in Amarillo under Panhandle Community Services in summer 2010.

“We have great parents who are very hard-working, but these are tough economic times,” Self said. “A lot of our parents work multiple jobs and aren’t home on the weekends, so we knew we had some kiddos that were feeding themselves and younger siblings.”

A third of children in the Texas Panhandle live in food-insecure households, meaning the children don’t always have food to eat at home and therefore rely primarily on food they eat at school, according to Feeding America, a hunger-relief charity based in Chicago.

That can create a cycle that is self-
perpetuating, Barton said.

“One of the most damaging things I see as a professional counselor is that they actually develop a sense that they’re not worth much,” he said. “That’s a very difficult thing to overcome for somebody who firmly believes that.”

But the problem is not irreversible, he said.

“People have to do something,” Barton said. “It’s not fixed with money. It’s not fixed with good thoughts. It’s fixed with people doing something.”

How to help

Several opportunities exist for getting involved Snak Pak 4 Kids. For more information, contact Panhandle Community Services at 806-342-6190 or contact Dyron Howell at dyron66@gmail.com.

■ Sponsor a student for $133 a year or adopt a school

■ Volunteer to help fill Snack Paks

■ Organize a peanut butter or Pop Tart drive in your community

■ Follow Snack Pak 4 Kids on Facebook

http://amarillo.com/news/local-news/2012-09-24/hungry-children-cant-learn-anything

Take it to the Bank

dalhart — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 19:52:29 +0000

Dalhart Snack Pak 4 Kid’s September Food Drive “Take it to the Bank” is off to a great start! With one week down our collection totals so far are outstanding. Drop off locations include: Capital Farm Credit, Dalhart Federal Savings and Loan, First National Bank, Happy State Bank, and Wells Fargo Bank. Locations are accepting granola bars and individual cereal boxes. In just the first week 274 granola bars and 108 individual cereals have been collected.

Friends for Change

dalhart — Fri, 31 Aug 2012 20:16:17 +0000

Maylee is a 1st grader at St. Anthony’s in Dalhart. The Disney Channel Show Friends for Change inspired her to make and sell magnets with her Aunt Jamie and donate the money she rasied to Snack Pak 4 Kids. Maylee wrapped up her project and brought her donation in today. She raised over $378 dollars! Thanks Maylee!