A modest and sustainable feeding program

Inez Ponce de Leon’s column, “Fighting for young minds,” (Question The Box, 9/25/24) was uplifting, as she shared how the feeding program initiated by Fr. Ben Nebres of the Ateneo Center for Educational Development “has fed over a hundred thousand students” since it started.

It was also validating as we at the Jose Abad Santos Memorial School-Quezon City (JASMS-QC) have likewise been able to sustain our annual weekday feeding program for public school students who fall under the category of “severely wasted children.” As per the World Health Organization, “child wasting refers to a child who is too thin for his or her height … [and] is the result of recent rapid weight loss or the failure to gain weight.”

Our feeding program (which is more modest in scale) started in 2014 when we were still located at our former campus along Edsa, partnering then with a public school in the San Francisco Del Monte area. Since we transferred to our new site on Congressional Avenue in 2017, we have partnered with a different public school just a stone’s throw away from us.

The feeding program kicks off a few weeks after the opening of classes and involves all our preschool to grade 12 students who follow a rotating schedule that runs almost throughout the school year. Each day, a group of six to seven students from one class is assigned as the meal sponsor. A larger class size will have about four groups that are scheduled separately.

Ideally, the group members plan the menu a month in advance, and save money from their allowance or plant vegetables (to minimize expenses) for the ingredients needed for a nutritionally balanced, yet palatable meal. They also go to the market with their class adviser to buy other ingredients, usually a day before their feeding schedule.

Students are highly discouraged from simply asking their parents for money. To ensure that they follow the suggested practical and creative ideas to raise funds (P1,500) for their meal sponsorship, their parents fill out a monitoring sheet where their efforts are itemized. It is hoped that this sparks within them the spirit of charity and philanthropy, and makes them realize the value of money.

On the morning of their schedule, the students themselves do the cooking at our home economics laboratory, and then personally bring the food to our partner school together with their class adviser and our student activities coordinator in time for the 9:30 to 10:30 a.m. feeding hour. Our beneficiaries this year are 30 preschoolers; in preceding years, we fed students from Grades 2, 4, and 6, as recommended by our partner school.

Each beneficiary kid’s body mass index is measured every two months, enabling us to determine how the meals we serve daily are affecting their bodies. We are happy to note that toward the end of the school year, there is an increase in the weight and height vis-à-vis the age of about 96 percent of these kids. Their teachers also report to us that there is an improvement in their academic performance, as well as demeanor and attendance, as they look forward to the meals, something they are sadly deprived of at home.

Through the years, this project has involved more entities within JASMS-QC. In 2018, we included as group sponsors the teachers, nonteaching personnel, the parents’ association, and even some administrators and officials of the Philippine Women’s University (our mother university). The latest addition was the alumni group in 2021.

Obviously, our feeding program is limited to just the small number of kids that we are able to feed amidst the many more students who experience hunger every day. That’s all we can handle for now given our small school population, unlike during our first five years of doing this when we had more enrollees that made it possible for us to feed between 90 and 100 kids. But just imagine: if a lot more were doing this, more students would be fed, helping improve their performance in school.

Given that many were devastated by the recent Severe Tropical Storm “Kristine” and that Christmas—the season of giving—is upon us, now may be an opportune time for other private schools, institutions, and groups to consider organizing a long-term school-based feeding program because, as we experience at JASMS-QC, it is feasible, effective, and sustainable.

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Claude Lucas C. Despabiladeras teaches at JASMS-QC. He is also a voice talent for TV and radio commercials, English- and Filipino-dubbed TV shows and movies, and for ABS-CBN’s Jeepney TV Channel.