Quick! Think of four children you know. Can you visualize their faces? Now, think about this alarming situation: one of those children represents the one in four kids in Arkansas who are in a battle with hunger (according to Feeding America). This lack of access to food and limited or uncertain availability of nutritionally adequate food is what is known as food insecurity.

While the fear of not having enough food to eat is burdensome no matter your age, children are particularly vulnerable to the economic challenges families are facing. Kids struggling with hunger are found to have poor academic performance and discipline problems in school.

There Are Children In Crisis

Arkansas, which had ranked first in the nation in child hunger for many years, is now the seventh hungriest state for children, according to the Arkansas Foodbank. The Foodbank’s Chief Executive Officer Rhonda Sanders says, “The percentage of hungry kids has not decreased in Arkansas, but it has not risen as it has in other states.

Sanders conveys, “State initiatives that support foodbanks and schools serving breakfast in the classroom helped to stem the tide of child food insecurity during the Great Recession.” She also credits schools that have become engaged in childhood hunger and the expansion of summer feeding and after-school feeding programs.

“Hunger is a solvable problem. It just takes all of the right people to come together to make sure these kids have enough to eat,” she says.

Innovating The Food Delivery Method

Increasingly, schools are playing a much larger role in connecting hungry children with food, because, Sanders says, “When you’re hungry, you’re not able to worry about that science experiment. You’re certainly not able to sit quietly and read.”

For two years, Arkansas Foodbank has been working with schools in its 33-county service area, which includes Little Rock, to launch food pantries. Six schools, one of those being Wakefield Elementary in the capitol city, now operate pantries. Students and their parents are able to take food home so that children and families eat in the evenings during the week, as well as on weekends.

“This is one of the more innovative programs we’re doing now, recognizing that there are children in crisis and their families are in crisis...that through the week and on the weekend, there’s not enough food for the entire household.”

The Foodbank is hopeful school pantries will be a useful supplement to after-school and summer feeding programs. Sanders says her organization found during its own research, sending home food in backpacks still left kids hungry. “We found that a lot of the food that was being sent home quite often didn’t even make it home. It was eaten on the bus or shared with other children. Then you had the issue that one sibling got food that way and the other siblings got home and didn’t have anything. So, while there is a place for that delivery method, it really pointed us in a direction that is about the whole family,” she explains.

A Kid Shouldn’t Have to Worry About Food on the Table

While food pantries and feeding programs don’t solve the root causes of childhood hunger, they do meet a critical need in the lives of nearly 200,000 Arkansas children. The need is great.