The Public School System\u2019s Child Nutrition Program is distributing over 10,000 meals daily basis.<\/p>\n
According to Dale Robert, PSS Child Nutrition Program director, the Grab & Go Meal Distribution program has raised the number of prepared meals to over 10,000 daily as of last week, and the program still plans to add more since sites continue to run out. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe did well over 10,000 meals [last Wednesday], almost 10,500, and we have plans to deliver 11,275,\u201d Roberts said. <\/p>\n
Since the meal distribution started on April 16, the number of distributed meals has shot up due to many government employees being furloughed, Roberts said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen we restarted again in April 16, we prepared 10,000 meals and we delivered 9,100. Since folks in the government, across the board, have been furloughed, the numbers have really jumped. Sites where we hadn\u2019t run out before we actually ran out. We\u2019ve increased the numbers each day since,\u201d Roberts said. <\/p>\n
However, Roberts also reported that he has noticed some members of the community taking advantage of the program. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe sites have been generally running smoothly but I travel site to site and I\u2019ve seen lots of families that are cheating and going to multiple sites. I fear that there are abuses happening. I\u2019ve got folks coming to the sites asking for nine, 10, 11 meals at a time. Some are able to produce documentation for their kids and some are not and, of course, we\u2019re not in the business of turning people away if we don\u2019t have a good reason and the only reason is if they don\u2019t have documentation,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n
If the program continues to be abused, Roberts fears that the number of meals that will be prepared and distributed daily will have to be capped. \u201cWe are already serving more lunches each day than we have at these schools on regular school days and we can increase and we can keep increasing because we have kids in the community that are not students like 3-year-olds and other children that wouldn\u2019t normally show up on a school roster. We\u2019re going to keep feeding but we are going to approach a number at some point where it\u2019s going to go above the number of students that we can account for on a regular basis so I\u2019m going to have to put a cap at some point,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n
Fortunately, according to Roberts, the CNMI hasn\u2019t reached that point yet. \u201cWe\u2019re not there yet, and I hope we don\u2019t get to that point, I keep expecting that we\u2019ll level off but each day we seem to be adding a little bit more. It\u2019s not a funding issue but it\u2019s a program issue and I just want to leave it at that.\u201d <\/p>\n
When the meal distribution began back in March, the CNP was preparing about 8,000 breakfast, lunch, and snacks and served just over 6,400 children daily until the program was temporarily put on hold. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Public School System\u2019s Child Nutrition Program is distributing over 10,000 meals daily basis. According…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-321802","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/321802","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=321802"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/321802\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=321802"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=321802"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=321802"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}