When Essex Westford schools let out for the summer, the work doesn’t stop for child nutrition director Scott Fay and his team. Just days later, they begin converting the kitchen at Essex High School into a de facto packaging facility.
A cadre of food service workers will spend their days assembling hundreds of meal kits filled with breakfast and lunch fixings such as muffins and fruit; tortilla chips, ground beef and shredded cheese for nachos; and bread and cold cuts to make sandwiches.
They’ll stack the boxes on palettes, load them into a 26-foot refrigerated truck, and deliver them to half a dozen or so communities in Chittenden and Washington counties. A mile down the road, at Albert D. Lawton Intermediate School, another group of staffers will make single-serve meals for kids to eat alfresco at Essex Junction’s Maple Street Park and Pool and local day camps.
In all, Essex Westford’s food service program delivered 200,000 free meals last summer, according to Fay. This year, he expects to provide even more.
Those meals represent just a portion of the food that schools and nonprofits provide, free of charge, to keep Vermont children fed in the summer. The number of summer breakfasts and lunches distributed across the state has more than doubled since 2019, from roughly 439,000 to more than 1 million. So successful is Vermont’s effort that in 2023, the state ranked first in the nation for summer meal program participation, according to the national nonprofit Food Research & Action Center. Though federal regulations specify that meal distribution sites must be located in high-poverty areas, anyone 18 and under, from any town, may participate.
School kitchens such as Fay’s weren’t always able to feed so many kids. But pandemic-era changes to the federally funded summer meals programs, which allowed more flexibility and efficiency in meal delivery, have become permanent, allowing programs such as Essex Westford’s to expand their reach.
Though other federal food benefits have been cut or threatened, funding for summer meals remains intact.
Before COVID-19 shut down schools, kids had to go to a designated site each summer day and eat there. That was difficult for working families and those without transportation access, according to Rosie Krueger, state director of child nutrition programs. Now, federal guidelines allow programs in rural areas — a classification which applies to the vast majority of Vermont — to provide take-home meals or food boxes with the ingredients needed to make breakfasts and lunches for multiple days during the summer months.
The new guidelines have been a game changer for Vermont, according to Tim Morgan, child nutrition policy and training lead at Hunger Free Vermont. Fay’s Essex Westford program, for example, is now able to deliver weekly meal kits to towns such as Roxbury and Bolton that are too small or don’t have the staff to run their own programs.
Though other federal food benefits have been cut or threatened under the Trump administration, funding for summer meals remains intact, at least for this year. Programs are reimbursed by the feds at a set rate for each meal served — about $3 for breakfast and $5.40 for lunch — which accounts for both the cost of food and the labor to produce and distribute it. Last year, Vermont received $4.4 million in federal funds to reimburse meal programs, plus another $255,000 to support state-level administrative expenses.
Windham Northeast Supervisory Union director of nutrition Melissa Bacon attributes Vermont’s success to its collaborative spirit.
Bacon’s summer meals program in southern Vermont is one of 52 that will begin operating this month. Each is designed to meet the needs of the communities they serve. Bacon’s team of a dozen full- and part-time employees, for example, will provide meals to summer camps and libraries, while also preparing 1,300 meal kits each week. Each contains a gallon of milk, seven days’ worth of ingredients, and recipe suggestions for breakfast and lunch. Every Wednesday afternoon from late June to mid-August, families can drive up to Bellows Falls Union High School and workers will load the bags into their trunks, an efficient distribution method that’s a holdover from the pandemic.
Windham Northeast is known for including locally grown food in school meals, and summer provides an even greater bounty. Meal kits contain corn, peppers, lettuce and carrots from area farms and Vermont-made Cabot cheese, Yalla hummus and Slice of Vermont pizza dough. Last summer, the district bought blueberries in bulk from Green Mountain Orchards in Putney.
During weekly distributions, Bacon said, families often tell her how helpful the food bags are in these tough economic times.
Whitney Patterson, a nurse at Bellows Falls Union High School and parent of two, said the program has been “amazing” for local families, including hers. Getting nutritious, fresh food such as kale, carrots, eggs, whole-wheat bread and presliced chicken breast every week is “a tremendous money saver,” Patterson said. And because the meals are easy to prepare, it enables her fifth and seventh graders to be more independent when it comes to making their own breakfasts, lunches and snacks when school’s out.
In Barre, the meal program has been especially important for families hit hard by catastrophic flooding the past two summers. The effort is run by the Barre Unified Union School District, which contracts with an outside food vendor, Genuine Foods. Federal rules don’t allow the vendor to offer meal kits with bulk ingredients, so it prepares kid-friendly meals such as macaroni and cheese, pulled pork sandwiches, and chicken Caesar wraps. The meals are available at several sites in Barre, including the municipal swimming pool, the Lower Graniteville Playground and low-income housing developments. The district also provides meals for town libraries in South Ryegate, Bradford, Wells River and Groton.
Because programs are reimbursed for each meal they serve, they have the flexibility to add additional sites if needed, said Jen Hutchinson, Barre’s manager of school nutrition. During the floods of 2023 and 2024, they were even able to help provide emergency meals to both kids and adults at the Barre Municipal Auditorium and the Health Center in Plainfield.
Not every region in Vermont has a robust summer meal program. Rutland and the Northeast Kingdom are areas where it has been particularly hard to staff programs, according to Krueger, the state child nutrition director.
In some places, local nonprofits step up when school districts can’t. For the past eight summers, the Hartford Community Coalition, a small organization focused primarily on substance misuse and mental health, has distributed meals to kids in and around the New Hampshire border town. It contracts for single-serve meals made by the Abbey Group, the vendor that feeds Hartford School District students during the school year. A group of volunteers fills bags with five days’ worth of breakfasts and lunches and, once a week, hands them out at the White River School in White River Junction. When families have barriers that prevent them from getting to the distribution site, volunteers have even delivered meals right to their homes.
“We want to try to make it as equitable as possible,” said Emily Zanleoni, the coalition’s executive director.
The state also works hard to make sure people know about the program, Krueger said. School districts are required to send information about summer meal sites to families in June. And 211, a community-resource hotline run by the United Ways of Vermont, can share pickup locations. The Agency of Education also prints out banners and yard signs to direct families to meal sites.
Free summer meals complement Vermont’s federally funded Summer Electronic Benefit Transfer, or EBT, program, which provides thousands of low-income families with $120 per school-age child to help buy groceries during school break, Krueger said. If the money is used at a local farmer’s market, it is doubled through a state program called Crop Cash. The benefit was provided to qualifying Vermonters earlier this month, Krueger said. Those who didn’t receive the funds but think they are eligible can apply on the State of Vermont’s website.
When it comes to the meals program, Krueger said she encourages all families in Vermont to take advantage of it.
The more participation, the more federal money the state can bring in, Krueger said, “which allows the kids who really need it to access those summer meals.”
The original print version of this article was headlined “A Million Meals | When school’s out, summer food programs provide free breakfast and lunch to kids”
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This article appears in The Food Issue 2025.
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