The children of Doña Dodson, Sandy Parker and Jim Shively are all grown up, but that isn’t stopping them from doing their best to ensure that other kids get enough to eat.
The trio heads up a food bank program at Teller Elementary School in the Congress Park neighborhood that sends food home over weekends and school breaks with some of the needy children at the school.
The Teller Backpack Friends program started in 2013 after Dodson, Parker and Shively took it over from teachers who were noticing that some of their students were coming to school hungry.
“Most of us are astounded that there are so many hungry people in our neighborhood,” said Parker, who has two grandchildren attending Teller.
Dodson’s son, now 42, graduated from Teller, and she still lives in the neighborhood. Shively is Parker’s husband.
The three of them are joined by several other volunteers every Friday to pack up bags of food for students who are in need to take home over the weekend. The group has a grocery list for each of the 18 families who receive bags. The families are anonymous and identified by numbers. Some of the numbers have special instructions, such as one family that can’t have nuts and another that can’t take jelly along with their peanut butter.
Students can pick up the bags and bring them home that afternoon. Last week, the group met Thursday and Friday to give each family two bags for spring break this week.
In each bag was some yogurt, dried milk, ramen noodles, hard-boiled eggs, fruit and some canned items. The group has to be careful not to make the bags too heavy since some children as young as 5 could be carrying the bags home.
“We’d like to send home canned vegetables and fruit every week, but we can’t send it all — it makes it too heavy,” Dodson said.
When the program first got off the ground, the group was purchasing the food on their own through donations. Now Parker and Shively have worked out a deal with to have some of the food donated and the rest available for 6 cents per pound. Still, Parker estimated they need about $5,000 per year to keep the program going.
“We’re scrounging around for anything we can get,” Parker said.
The backpack group is now partnered with the Teller PTA, a nonprofit organization, so it can accept donations. The Teller students also contribute with a penny drive, which raised some money last year.
Teller principal Jessica Rose Downs said some teachers a few years ago noticed that some of the students were coming to school not having eaten, including over a weekend. They realized that for a few kids, their best meals were breakfast and lunch at the school.
They started sending home snacks with the students, but when Parker met with Downs, she and her husband decided they could step in.
“Sandy, Jim and Doña have taken off with the program, and it has grown and become strong because of them,” Downs said.
She said she notices a difference now in the attention span of the students in the program, and they are doing better in school.
Dodson added: “These kids would be really missing boat if not for us.”
Joe Vaccarelli: 303-954-2396, jvaccarelli@denverpost.com or twitter.com/joe_vacc
