Some of the students who come to the school food pantry at Lemon Crest Elementary in Lakeside are shy. Others speak limited English.
But already, there’s a second-grader who hugs Kelcy Sutton, a school counselor who runs the program, every time he sees her.
“I don’t know other languages, but he saw love and acceptance, and he saw me trying to help,” she said Wednesday, just before families picking up their children from school began stopping in to get fresh produce and staples, too.
After spending about a year on the wait list with Feeding San Diego, last fall Lemon Crest opened its school pantry with the nonprofit, which operates 60 school pantries around the region and has more than 30 on a waitlist.
Feeding San Diego serves about 150,000 households a month, and the school pantry program serves, on average, 11,500 households. Of the 60 schools in the program, 39 distribute food twice a month and the other 21 monthly.
At Lemon Crest, the food is set up on tables arranged in a U where families can grab what they need. The selections on Wednesday included green onions, rice, various drinks and a Taco Bell jarred sauce.
Watermelons and mangoes were particularly popular. Potatoes were popular, too.
The offerings are excess food — much of it from farms in California, says Carissa Casares, a Feeding San Diego spokesperson.
“We really try to get an emphasis on fresh produce as much as possible,” she explained. “That’s often what is expensive in the store as well.
“But right now,” she added, “everything is expensive.”
While Feeding San Diego provides the food, the sites are run by people on school staff. Sutton hopes to continue the program through the summer as well.
Casares said that the first programs that “touched the Mountain Empire” area were mobile food pantries. They provided help to a lot of communities with many seniors and people who lacked transportation — a big issue, she said, “because food is heavy.”
Casares wrote over email that they operate 25 mobile pantry sites in rural areas of the county.
Sutton said she sometimes drives food to members of the community. She said they sometimes have canned food, and she’ll see them with a stroller and kids on a street without a sidewalk.
Wednesdays are early-release days. Families trickled into the room to pick up their food. Kindergarteners were released first. They could take as much sauce as they wanted but were asked to take only one bag of rice.
Ittzel Perez, a mother of five there with her youngest, praised the convenience and said the fresh fruits and vegetables were favorites — “just like the vegetables, broccoli, mangoes, apples.” Watermelon was especially exciting.
Katherine Torrance was there picking up food for other families and her own, in particular oranges and green onions — a favorite of her daughter’s. “I mean, it’s an odd thing, but she loves the green onions,” she said.
The pantry helps her address a nutrition gap, she added. The layout makes it feel like a shopping trip. And the “beautiful little surprises” made it less intimidating to ask for help.
“We even got a watermelon one time,” she said. “My daughter was just so excited because she’d been wanting watermelon, and I couldn’t get her watermelon.”
