When Oak Park and River Forest High School students returned to school this week they found, just like at the end of last school year, four cabinets stocked with free snacks in the school’s hallways. The snack filled cabinets will remain for at least the first semester even though the OPRF District 200 Board of Education has yet to vote on a proposal by the Students Feeding Students (SFS) group for the school to fund eight snack cabinets.
Although SFS has only raised enough money to buy snacks for the first few weeks of school the OPRF administration has committed to buying the snacks when the SFS initial inventory runs out.
“We’ve committed to supplying the existing four cabinets through the remainder of the semester after the current Students Feeding Students inventory has been exhausted,” said OPRF spokeswoman Karin Sullivan in a text message.
The school board and administration are still trying to figure out the best way to combat food insecurity at OPRF. After student and adult organizers of the effort presented their first proposal at the June 25 school board meeting, they hoped and said they were led to believe that the school board would consider and vote upon SFS’s formal proposal at an August school board meeting. But that did not happen.
The students and a new parents’ group, OPRF High School Mutual Aid, had hoped the board would approve their proposal that the school budget $157,119 to fund eight snack cabinets this school year.
Over the summer organizers have met multiple times, sometimes together, sometimes separately, with OPRF administrators about the proposal trying to respond to concerns that some board members expressed at the June 25 board meeting and work out how the proposal could be implemented.
“We have shown continued persistence in meeting with the administration,” said Nolan Krueger, a leader of SFS, told the school board on Aug. 20.
Before the Aug. 20 meeting Krueger told Wednesday Journal that it felt a little like the administration and school board were slow walking them. He had hoped that the school board would formally consider and vote on their plan before the new year school began. SFS was ready to present its revised 13-page proposal at the Aug. 6 school board meeting but the SFS proposal was not put on the agenda of either that meeting or the Aug. 20 meeting.
“It’s been a really long process,” Krueger said.
Krueger and another member of SFS, Delaney Brummel made public comments at the Aug. 20 school board meeting expressing their frustration with the delay in addressing their proposal while remaining hopeful that their slightly revised proposal will ultimately be approved.
“We almost feel like we’ve been swept under the rug,” Brummell said. “The responses from some of the people in power that we’ve talked to and some of the people from the board have felt almost dismissive, or as if they’re trying to talk us out of the initiative, which isn’t something we’re almost comfortable doing and it’s not something we’re interested in giving up,”
Back in June, board members Fred Arkin, Jonathan Livingston and Kathleen Odell were supportive of the proposal, while three other board members, Tim Brandhost, Josh Gertz and board president Audrey Williams-Lee were skeptical saying that snack cabinets didn’t seem like the most targeted or best way to really help students who might be food insecure.
Now OPRF wants to create a committee to study the issue.
“We want to bring more people into the conversation to help us think through a productive way forward,” said Lee Williams, the school’s head of equity and student success. Williams has been the administrator working most closely with the proponents. “And that’s not to say that the conversations that we have had are not productive, but we want to learn more, and we want to think about this in a more holistic way, about how we should go forward to serve our students.”
After the meeting Odell and board member Graham Brisben said they are not disturbed by the lack of action and are looking for the best solution to the problem.
“Everyone shares an appreciation for the issue and a desire to address it,” Odell said. “And it’s just taking some time.”
Brisben praised the students in SFS.
“I think their interests, their motivations are all in the right place,” Brisben said. “And I think they’re doing a good job taking the constructive feedback they’ve been hearing at the board table. And I know they’re continuing to work with the administration, to refine the best approach for going forward.”