The Commonwealth's lunch Ladies aren't taking the summer off.

Starting tomorrow, Jefferson County students will have opportunities for free breakfast and lunch thanks to Kentucky's summer food program.

Along with the standard weekday walk in and walk up food programs.

The school district has hosted the last few summers.

A new bulk pickup program is being offered to help families with busier schedules.

During the summer months, which is about one fourth of a child's year.

Many families are challenged to meet the financial requirements of providing meals if they've been depending on free and reduced school lunches and school breakfasts during the school year.

The need is great, but the means are not always there.

So the Summer Food Service program is designed to provide those nutritious meals so they can have good, nutritious meals 365 days of the year, which is what they require to grow and develop the way they should.

We served over 350,000 more breakfasts and over 320,000 more lunches this school year.

So we are hoping to roll that success right into our summer feeding program.

The summer feeding program is for any child who is 18 years of age or younger, regardless of income.

You just have to show up at the open site and you can receive a free breakfast and a free lunch.

They don't have to eat on site.

They can receive multiple days of meals.

Parents can pick up meals.

And as you know, there are some rural areas in the fringes of Jefferson County.

So that need is being addressed by Jefferson County Public Schools.

What we're seeing is a great increase in the number of meals served as a result.

We have three types of meal service available this year.

We have our meal service that we can provide in our schools, where we have our kitchen facilities, where we're able to cook hot meals.

We also are we'll be serving our community sites and affiliated sites and parks and things like that through our mobile feeding.

And we've actually expanded our mobile feeding program this year.

We're very excited about that.

This new program offers is it will allow parents to come once a week and pick up five lunches and five breakfast.

And we will be serving on Tuesdays starting June 4th, and we will serve from 10 to 1 and boxes will be provided on a first come, first serve basis.

A parent will be able to pick up up to two boxes for children in the household.

However, if they have more children, they will need to bring all those kids with them when they come to pick the boxes up.

And then they'll be able to receive a box for each child.

We'll be starting off at each location with about 180 boxes.

And if we see that the need is greater, we will definitely increase those number of boxes available going into the next week.

We anticipate about 2000 probably more meal sites across the state of Kentucky this year.

And we have about 175 organizations that provide those meals.

Last year we had nearly 10 million meals served over the summer time, which gives kids throughout the school.

The stuff on.

Jefferson County Public Schools will continue their free lunch program through the next school year.