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Granite School District Buys New Mobile Pantry To Stave Off Student Hunger

Granite Education Foundation

A new mobile food pantry will help ensure kids in the Granite School District have enough to eat. The Granite Education Foundation, the district’s non-profit arm unveiled a new truck today that will bring groceries to kids to take home.

Students and district officials gathered Friday to celebrate the new truck.

Granite School District started a partnership with the Utah Food bank in 2015 to bring mobile food pantries to schools in their community. But as the need for the service grew, the Food Bank ran out of trucks. So the district’s non-profit decided to purchase one of their own.  

Brent Severe is leading the effort. He says three out of five students in district are food insecure, which means they don’t always know where their next meal is going to come from. The district also serves almost three quarters of the state’s refugee population.

“We surveyed our principals a couple of years ago and their biggest concern was our food insecure students in our schools,” Severe says. “We’ve got to find better ways of helping secure that for them so that they’re not going hungry. Because kids can’t learn if their stomachs are growling.”

The new truck will allow the district to make 15 more pantry stops per month.   

Whittney Evans grew up southern Ohio and has worked in public radio since 2005. She has a communications degree from Morehead State University in Morehead, Kentucky, where she learned the ropes of reporting, producing and hosting. Whittney moved to Utah in 2009 where she became a reporter, producer and morning host at KCPW. Her reporting ranges from the hyper-local issues affecting Salt Lake City residents, to state-wide issues of national interest. Outside of work, she enjoys playing the guitar and getting to know the breathtaking landscape of the Mountain West.
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