CMS summer meal sites say they’re ‘running smoothly.’ Finding them is another problem

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools offers free summer meals at locations scattered throughout the county, but it’s hard to find where to go.

Most CMS schools – 111 of the total 184 – participated this year in the National School Lunch Act’s Community Eligibility Provision, which allows them to give free lunches to all of their students.

The status is determined by the proportion of students at each school who receive Social Security benefits, experience homelessness, are in foster care or qualify for Medicaid. Schools are eligible if at least 40% of their students automatically qualify for free school meals. Around 15% of Mecklenburg County households are considered food insecure, according to national nonprofit Feeding America.

So, what happens when kids aren’t in school for the summer?

CMS offers free breakfasts and lunches for kids at community centers and school campuses throughout Mecklenburg County, even if they’re not enrolled in the district. Vilma Leake, District 2 county commissioner, said some community members complain the program isn’t running as smoothly as it should.

“My people are telling me they’re having issues with poor service,” said Leake. “The communication is terrible, and I want to know if my kids are being taken care of.”

Leake says there are about 100 students in her district who need meals through the summer lunch program. She says parents have complained there hasn’t been enough communication from the district. That’s why I set out to figure out how easy or hard it might be to track down meals locations and how they’re operating.

The sites seem to be running smoothly, but parsing through contradictory and incomplete information about where to find them made getting there tricky.

What our reporter found

My search for “Mecklenburg County summer meals” started in a place you might expect: Google. The first result was a page on the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction’s website titled “How to Find Summer Meals.”

The “NC Site Finder” map showed five meal distribution centers in all of Mecklenburg County. Four of them were open during a check on Monday. Each was open for a 45-minute window, from noon to 12:45 pm.

Five food distribution sites for a school district with 141,000 students seemed scant, especially when there were as many as 53 hot meals sites as recently as 2018. So, I moved forward by following the website’s directions to text my “full address, zip code or city” to NCDPI’s number to find the closest food distribution center.

Just typing “Charlotte” produced an error message. So, I texted my specific address.

The addresses and hours for three food distribution sites popped up in my inbox, none of which matched any of the five on NCDPI’s map. The webpage also offered a hotline: 1-866-3-HUNGRY. To make matters more confusing, the operator on that line gave the location of yet another meal distribution site. It wasn’t any of the three that had been texted to me or on NCDPI’s map.

CMS’ school nutrition webpage neither offers any clarity nor does it have a list or map of meal sites. The operator gave me a few different options, confirmed they’re open and asked if I had a particular one in mind.

“Some don’t take walk-ins,” she said. “Some schools may be over-capacity for what their cafeterias can hold, so that often plays into it.”

She didn’t have an estimate of the number of sites that take walk-ins, since she said it varies. At all of the urban meal distribution sites, she said, the food must be eaten on-site in the cafeteria, rather than taken to-go.

“I would advise that people interested in finding meals should just give us a call, and we’ll help them find the location closest to them,” she said.

A spokesperson for CMS said they can’t yet give an exact total on the number of meal distribution centers in the district.

“It is too early in the cycle for data,” said Susan Vernon-Devlin, CMS executive director of media relations and crisis communications. “We have several summer meals locations in areas of the county where the need for nutrition is greatest. Those who need meals reach out and find means to access them.”

Visit to summer meal sites

I went to four meal distribution sites around the county. At all of them, people working there said the meal program was going off without a hitch.

“It’s been going great,” said Jessica Spann at Ivory Baker Recreation Center, which was hosting a CMS summer food distribution location and summer camp. “The food deliveries are always on point and precise, and the kids love the lunches.”

Spann said Ivory Baker has been a summer meal site for a few years, but its meal program for this summer started up Monday.

It was a similar story at Southview Recreation Center, in Leake’s district.

“Everything has been pretty smooth so far,” said Phillip Gottlieb, who was overseeing food distribution and a summer camp at the community center. “The lunches are for the campers, but we also get a mixture of folks from the community who come to get food.”

Gottlieb and Spann both said they always had enough meals to meet demand.