by Yanichka Ariunbold, staff reporter
Despite its relative obscurity, Consol’s food pantry has helped students in need since 2013, actively serving four to ten students a week, 43 students in total.
“There are a lot of people on our campus who help their families, so they work, help provide food or live on their own. This is a service that we can provide them, so that they don’t have worry about where their next meal is coming from, and so that they can concentrate more on their school work,” Credit Recovery teacher and Food Pantry director Jody Gougler said. “Plus, they’ll just be healthier.”
Located in Room 1291, the food pantry offers free food to students in a completely confidential way — all that a student needs to do to access its services is fill out a form, which is located in the front office, the nurse’s office and the counselors’ offices, as well as generally with most teachers and administrators.
“Anybody can go to the food pantry. There’s a form that the student fills out one time, and it asks five questions. It’s basic, like, do you live in our attendance zone, your name, how many people live in your household, if you know your income you can put that down,” Gougler said. “Once that’s filled out, then any student who needs anything can access it. It’s 100 percent anonymous.”
English teacher Grace Stanford and former Consol counselor Anne Hoffman started up the food pantry at Consol upon realizing that “there was an obvious need” in the school,” seeking to fulfill such a need.
“What Grace and Anne realized is that there were several teachers on campus feeding students regularly. I might feed a student one week, Grace might help feed the student the next week, and another teacher might help feed a student the week after that. We figured out that there had to be a better way,” Gougler said. “So they started researching and came across the food pantries program, and they contacted the Brazos Valley Food Bank — that’s who we have our partnership with.”
School food pantries are a national program that the USDA set up to bridge the “disconnect of service for people who are under 18,” as only adults can legally access food in a community food bank or a church food pantry. However, despite their institution on a national scale, food pantries are unmistakably rare in Texas.
“There’s only like one other food pantry in the state. State as big as Texas, we’re just getting started. If you go to other states like Oklahoma, Kentucky, North Carolina, Maine, Illinois — some of those states have a food pantry in every high school,” Gougler said. “It’s an underutilized program in Texas. But in other parts of the country, they’re very common in a lot of the schools.”
Though the food pantry is technically open every Friday from 3;45 PM to 4:30 PM, Gougler and the other volunteers on staff are currently not limiting access to it during other times.
“We have regular hours, but if a student comes in and needs something in between times, we’re happy to open the pantry up. I had a student come this morning that needed some stuff, and when I got here this morning around 7:20, I went and opened it up,” Gougler said. “We are fortunately in a position right now where we don’t have to turn anybody away. We have been able to keep a fund balance to where we can support anybody who needs it. It’s not gonna always be like that, but we can right now, so we don’t turn anybody away.”
Well-stocked, the food pantry boasts a wide variety of food as well as other necessities.
“We offer fruits and vegetables, cereal, peanut butter and jelly and macaroni and cheese, as well as beans, rice and pasta. In addition to the macaroni and cheese, we have boxed milk, canned tuna, canned chicken, the ready meals, chili, beef stew, and lasagna,” Gougler said. “We also give out all kinds of toiletries like shampoos, deodorants, soap, laundry detergent, because if you don’t have enough food to eat, you’re not gonna spend money on deodorant.”
Gougler calls the model implemented in the pantry for choosing food “client choice,” in that students are free to pick out what they want in a way similar to “going to the grocery store.”
“If you need seven cans of corn, you can take seven cans of corn. There may come a time when we would have to limit what we offer, but right now, we don’t have to,” Gougler said. “We’re very happy about it because the need one week may be ‘I need ten things of milk,’ and your need the next week might be ‘I need some chicken’ or ‘I need some macaroni and cheese.’”
Due to the food pantry’s partnership with the Brazos Valley Food Bank, the directors often prefer monetary donations to food donation so that they can spend money for food cost-effectively, and so that they can guarantee that the food they receive is safe to hand out.
“We prefer that we get money in donations for a couple of reasons. One is we are a partner from the Brazos Valley Food Bank, so we can get our food through the BVFB, and it really stretches a dollar. Things that would cost several dollars at a store, you can pay a quarter for,” Gougler said. “And the other thing is, all the food that we get comes in from them, so they’ve already checked it out to make sure it isn’t expired, or the can’s not dented, or it’s not rotten. You can go online and order it, you know what they have, and you know how much they have.”
All in all, Gougler stresses the importance of publicity for the food pantry to ensure its continued success and to make sure that it is accessible to any individual student.
“If teachers feel like a student is struggling, if they realize that a student comes in and has a headache six days in a row, they’ll ask, ‘Hey, have you had time for lunch?’ and if the student says, ‘No, I haven’t had time for lunch,” not having lunch for a couple of days is one thing, not having time for lunch six days in a row might lead you to believe that the student is struggling with food insecurity,” Gougler said. “The teacher might just pull them aside and say, ‘Hey, did you know we have a place where you can access food? It’s free, and it’s confidential.’”
Check out a gallery of the food pantry below:
