How Feed and Read is Fueling Education with Food

On worship days, St. Luke Baptist Church in Spencer, Oklahoma, is filled with the sound of singing and prayer, hymns rising to the rafters. During weekdays in the summer, the sanctuary is quiet. But the large community room in the back of the church hums with another noise: many soft, overlapping voices of children reading.

At each of the dozen-plus tables, children sit one-on-one with volunteer mentors. Worksheets with vocabulary lists, word problems, and short stories, as well as markers and pencils cluster around each pair. The kids are engaged and locked into the lesson. They arrived hungry, but after a meal made by St. Luke volunteers as part of Feed the Children’s Summer Feed and Read program, they’re focused and ready to learn!

“If kids don’t practice reading over the summer, they become remedial,” Jeannette Williams, a St. Luke volunteer, explains. “And when they start back to school, you end up trying to teach them all over again because they’ve fallen behind. They forgot what they’ve learned during the year. But if they read over the summer, they retain what they’ve learned.”

The phenomenon Jeannette is referring to is known as ‘summer slide.’ When school ends, kids face a use-it-or-lose-it situation with the reading, writing and math skills they’ve picked up. Children from lower-income families are more vulnerable to the slide, since they often have fewer opportunities to work on these skills (day camps, paid tutoring, parents with enough free time to devote to reading practice).

That’s where programs like St. Luke’s Whiz Kids come in! For nearly 10 years, the church has hosted a free summer reading program. It’s manned entirely by volunteers, most of them congregation members like Jeannette, and has helped hundreds of kids keep their skills sharp during the long summer break.

The church always provided snacks for the kids. However, the need for food recently increased. In the past, children who attended Whiz Kids were often able to eat a school-provided meal before coming to the program. These meals extended into the summer months for kids who needed them.

However, “A lot of the meals that were being provided for the kids during the summer were cut from the federal budget,” Jeannette explains.

When that happened, the kids lost what was, in some cases, their most reliable source of food. Students were showing up for Whiz Kids hungry for more than a snack – and thanks to your support, St. Luke delivered.

Once the kids were no longer hungry for food, they became hungry to learn!

“The impact I’ve seen is incredible,” Jeannette says proudly. “I’ll give you an example: there was one girl we had this past year. Reading was her worst subject. She said she hated it, because she wasn’t very good at it. We were having a conversation the other day and she said, ‘You know, reading is my favorite subject now because I know how to read better.’ She’s reading more on her own; she’s having her parents take her to the library.”

“You can’t teach anybody something on an empty stomach, you know?” Jeannette adds. “So Feed the Children is a big help to St. Luke, because it gives us extra food and extra resources for the kids to tap into so that we can do more for them.”

St. Luke is just one of the many partner organizations that benefits from the Summer Feed and Read program. With summer and the end of school right around the corner, it’s not too early to start thinking about adding your support and helping break the summer slide!