The Bayfield Kids 4 Kids (Bk4k) backpack program has completed its first year of providing backpacks full of ready-to-eat food for some elementary school kids to take home for the weekend. The program is coordinated by the Bayfield Family Center.
Some local households struggle intermittently to keep enough food on the shelf. School breakfasts and lunches are sometimes the main food these kids get. The backpacks help fill the gap on weekends.
Volunteers load the backpacks every Thursday afternoon at the little building (one of the valley's old rural schools) south of the old middle school gym. Keeping food stocks up is an ongoing effort.
Last Thursday after volunteers from Calvary Presbyterian Church finished the week's work, members of the Bayfield High School Family, Career and Community Leaders of American helped unload more food that was collected at BHS. A group of fifth grade student council members from the elementary school also helped. They also got a lesson on what the backpack program does and how the food is provided.
Family Center director Pam Willhoite told all the students, "We are packing 80 backpacks today. If we didn't get food like this every week, we couldn't do this."
There are lots of backpack programs around the country, she said, "but we have something they don't - the partnership with you kids." That's why it's called Bayfield Kids 4 Kids, kids helping each other.
"The kids are partnering with caring adults to make sure this program helps. If it wasn't for these kids doing this for each other, we wouldn't have this," she said.
Teachers can refer students for back packs if they see indications the child isn't getting enough to eat. The referral form lists indications such as extreme hunger on Monday morning, regularly asking the teacher for food, asking for seconds, also saving, hoarding or stealing food to take home for themselves or a sibling.
The referral form also lists things like excessive absences or tardiness, chronic sickness, and concentration or behavior problems.
The food brought last Thursday from BHS will be used this weekend. The elementary school also has been collecting food for the program. It was supposed to be delivered today, according to BES counselor Rob Stafford. "We have a lot," he added.
"We just seem to have an increasing number of families that are in need of food throughout the week and the weekend," he said. "That number just seems to grow. We're happy to be helping with food drives to help these families."
Willhoite told the Times, "All of last year, we served just under 900 back packs starting from just before Thanksgiving." Recipients were second through fifth graders.
Right now they are approaching 700 back packs for this school year, and recipients have been expanded to include kindergarten and first grade.
"Last week we packed 35 for the primary (K-1) and 37 for the elementary," Willhoite said.
The need is ongoing for appropriate food items or money to buy them, and for volunteer packers, she said. "We shop every week to ensure that we have two sources of protein, two vegetables, a pasta or soup, two fruit items in the little cans, a breakfast bar or instant oatmeal and a snack item."
That's for each back pack. And it has to be light enough for kids to carry.
She repeated that kids helping kids is a big part of this. Along with the food delivered last week by the BHS FCCLA kids, Willhoite said there is a brand new group at BHS, an off-shoot of the county Big Brothers/Big Sisters program. But this is high school "bigs" pairing with "littles" from the elementary school.
They also wanted to do a back pack project and packed around 20 last week, she said.
Willhoite cites a statistic that one in four working families in Colorado sometimes doesn't have enough food. It's not chronic hunger here, she said. It's situational, tied to some unplanned significant expense for a family.
"When you live in a caring community, kids don't know that, because people help," she said. "All of us need help sometimes."
For more information or to help, call the Bayfield Family Center at 884-4747.
