For the third year, IDEA Public Schools is offering free meals to the community over the summer break.
Stephanie Eisenmenger, College Prep principal at IDEA, said this is the third year they have provided meals. Community members and kids don’t have to attend IDEA to get breakfast or lunch.
“We’ll serve breakfast and lunch to our summer school kids for free as well. But community members can come as they please,” Eisenmenger said.
Meals are served five days a week. The program will run through July 26 and the offering is made possible through the National School Lunch Program and School Breakfast Program.
Food service will be closed on federal holidays and from July 1 through July 5.
“We’ll have it from 7:30 a.m. to 9 a.m. and then lunch will be from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Monday through Friday,” she said.
This is the third year IDEA has offered summer school and it has about 170 students.
“Anyone from the community can come in,” Eisenmenger said.
There are always new people, but if anyone is dropping their kids off for summer school, they’ll also bring their siblings and they’ll have breakfast and when they pick them up they’ll have lunch, she added.
The meals are hot meals and cooked in the cafeteria. There is a main entree and always a fruit and vegetable option and a salad option that is pre-prepared.
IDEA decided to make the meals available to provide a service to families.
“One in four kids experience hunger, so being able to provide healthy food and forms of fruit and vegetables,” for a whole meal “is something that the school values,” Eisenmenger said.
They offer free breakfast and lunch during the school year as well.
“Many kids rely on that for their food during the school year that doing during the summer just seems like such an important thing to fill that gap so that kids can come back (from) the summer and feel replenished,” she added.
Offering meals to the community also opens the school doors to the community.
“We’ve had a lot of positive feedback from kids,” Eisenmenger said.
IDEA will have its first freshman class next year with 137 students.
“We are actually over-enrolled quite significantly in that grade. Normally, 120 is the number we aim for,” Eisenmenger said.
They had 2,025 applications and only 230 spots.
“We are fully enrolled across every grade right now all the way from kindergarten up to ninth grade. … The only kids that are coming in are coming off of our wait list. Every year we’ll do a new lottery and reset that waitlist,” she said.
The large waiting list was one of the reasons they launched fifth grade this year. “We weren’t actually supposed to have a fifth grade this past year, but we had so many kids on the waitlist and such a high desire to come here (that) we expanded to fifth grade. Now we are fully scaled in between. Now we’re just growing to high school,” Eisenmenger said.
“It’s a testament to the hard work that our teachers do every day to make sure that this space is positive and learning is continuing every single day,” Eisenmenger added.
They are currently about 90 percent staffed, but there are openings because they are adding a grade level.
“We had some good staff retention this year. … Every year we’ll just be adding that one more grade level worth of teachers, so we’ll be hiring for four more years,” she said.
They will have a Fish Camp in July for incoming freshmen.
“Our freshmen will come and they’ll get acclimated to understanding GPAs and getting to know each other, meeting their teachers and understanding the different courses and how it works toward graduation,” Eisenmenger said.
The students then start on the road to and through college, or RTTC.
“We start that in middle school, but it really amps up in ninth grade and they start looking at colleges and start to figure out what their list is going to be and what they need to do,” Eisenmenger said.
