Hero Teacher Sends Hungry First Graders Home With Backpacks Full Of Food

Marvin Callahan is a true hero. Callahan has been a teacher for more than 20 years, and lives in New Mexico. Two years ago, Callahan began a program to help feed hungry kids in his class. Using money out of his own pocket, he began stocking snack items for kids who were hungry.“At least, if I couldn’t do anything else, I could at least have food available at school, and my kids could have something to eat,” Callahan told NBC News.
New Mexico has been the highest ranking state for child hunger for the past two years in a row. The problem is widespread through the United States, with three-quarters of teachers reporting that children are showing up to school hungry. Low income families usually have the opportunity for kids to eat lunch and breakfast at school for a reduced or free price. No Kid Hungry conducted a study that found that only about 9.8 million kids of the 20 million kids in the U.S who participate in the free lunch program participate in the free breakfast program. This means kids often only get one meal a day. But what do kids do when they go home and there is no food to eat? Kids told Callahan that they did not want to go home on the weekends because they had no food at home to eat.
“It’s hard for me to go home some weekends when the kids are saying, ‘I don’t want to go home because I don’t have anything at home,'” Callahan told The Huffington Post. “We decided we were going to do something. We got some people together, discussed how we were going to do this, and got some ideas together about what a backpack program would look like.”

So Callahan teamed up with the Comanche school counselor Karin Medina and created a program where they would provide hungry kids a backpack of food to take home on weekends. The program does not have much funding outside of what the Comanche faculty put into it out of their own money. They do receive help from the local community with their project from local organizations and businesses. Retired teachers and other students volunteer to help with the task of feeding an estimated 37 families.Callahan and other Comanche faculty are now looking into setting up a program to provide in need students with warm winter coats and other necessities.