Weekend Backpack program prepares children for 12-day break
BUTLER TWP — Instead of gifts like 11 pipers piping and five golden rings, elementary students during Butler Area School District’s 12 days of Christmas will receive different meals courtesy of the Golden Tornado Scholastic Foundation.
Audray Muscatello Yost, an organizer of the Kids’ Weekend Backpack Program, said the foundation is preparing to send children in kindergarten through fifth grade at the elementary schools home with enough food to get them through the 12-day holiday break.
The packing room at Butler Intermediate High School will almost resemble a gathering of the numerous musicians and dancers gifted in the 12 days of Christmas as volunteers pack 36 meals for about 400 children in the district.
“There is a lot of people involved in this, everybody is helping,” Yost said. “It’s a big production. Everybody pretty much knows what they need to do.”
The Kids’ Weekend Backpack Program normally supplies food to children in Broad Street, Emily Brittain, McQuistion, Center Township, Northwest, Summit and Connoquenessing elementary schools every weekend. The program started in 2015 at McQuistion Elementary, and has since grown to accommodate every elementary school in the district, using thousands of dollars each week to get food for children enrolled in the program.
The volunteer-run organization uses donation and grant money to buy food from stores and food banks including the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank and Saint Vincent de Paul.
Each week, volunteers take inventory of all the food, then it is dated and placed into bins which go into the storage area at Butler Intermediate. Other volunteers then circle a table with the bins, which contain items like soup, macaroni and cheese, fruits and granola bars, grabbing one item from each to compile one meal bag. The bags are then put in storage units and transported to each elementary school by maintenance staff, where teachers and other faculty members discretely place the bags in the enrolled children’s backpacks.
“It’s all through donations and grant money that we get all our money; $10,000 a month usually is what it costs,” Yost said, “The custodians, the principals are all on board with it.”
According to Yost, the Kids’ Weekend Backpack Program gets a lot of donations around the holiday season, which helps keep children fed over the break. However, those donations often slow down in the early months of the year, so she urges people to remember the program even after the season of giving ends.
“Soup or Chef Boyardee items, those are things we can use a lot of,” she said. “We also have an Amazon Wish List — they can order on Amazon and it’s delivered right to central receiving.”
