(pensive music) (birds chirping) (light airy music) - From my understanding, everything started escalating around spring break, over the spring break holidays, and so word started to kinda leak out that we might not be going back to school over the spring holidays, after spring break.

- We have lots and lots of people in the state who are employed in hourly jobs, and those businesses have shut down temporarily.

People are out of work, and so they're unable to buy the food that they normally do and are unable to feed their family.

(gentle airy music) Fortunately, we live in a society, in a time when there is enough food in the world to feed everybody.

But when we talk about access, that's when things start to break down.

- Once the word came out that we weren't goin' back after spring break, the administrators got together and said, "Kids gotta still eat."

And they had to figure a way of how we were gonna do it, so they came up with going door-to-door with the bus routes.

We met as bus drivers that Monday, and we were delivering lunches that Wednesday.

(school staff chattering) There's been a lot of work going on behind the scenes to make sure everybody get what they need.

- I have 65 prepared, so we have- - [Lady] 200.

- 200, no, I have 60.

So we have 300 left.

- Children's development is happening at a rapid pace.

Having a proper diet, a good diet, makes a big difference in their ability to develop appropriately.

It's important for us to feed these kids, to get them the right nutrition, to get them well-balanced meals so that as they're developing, they do so at an appropriate and an ideal pace.

- Just these two?

- No, these two don't have it.

- When we get there, we all have people that volunteer that work in the cafeteria that come up and bag up the food for us to load.

So when we get there, they already did a great job having our food ready to be loaded on the buses and stuff for all the bus drivers.

(bus siren blaring) (bus exhaust pipes sputtering) (gentle serene music) - Well, one thing you hear us talk about around Starkville is Jacket Nation, and that Jacket Nation is that they're about to pitch in when it really counts.

Everybody got everybody back, in a sense, and that was through that volunteer.

They just want to help out in any way they can and as far as they can.

And so some just came to bag up lunches, some came to help load buses, and some help rode the buses and gave out lunches that day.

So it was like Jacket Nation came together to provide for all the community, that we do in Starkville.

(gentle serene music) (bus siren whistling) (bus door thudding) (latch rattling) (bus engine revving) And we just ride our regular route.

As you go through- about the second day, we knew who was going to get the meal before we got there.

I stood up front and I tell Coach Dennis, "Hey, give me two," 'cause I knew that family was going to get two meals or "Give me three," because I knew how many family members were going to come out of that house, so it's just a process that you learn because you know the people that you're going to, you know your routine, you know who going to come out and get it.

- [Carlos] Look like- - What?

- [Carlos] Isn't it three?

- [Coach Dennis] Four.

- [Carlos] Four if Brooklyn, if she come out.

(latch rattling) - There you go.

- [Coach Dennis] Yeah.

- Brooklyn.

- [Coach Dennis] Look at you two!

- Yay!

Gimme a high five.

- Hold on for a minute.

There we go.

There you go.

So whatchu got going on today?

(both laughing) And these are the kids that ride your bus every day.

That's the bus route I drive every morning.

And the lady that was on, the other lady that drives, she drive that route in the evening time, so these kids we see on a daily basis.

(bus engine revving) - There it go.

- [Bus Lady] There it go.

(bus honking) There you go.

They got a good running form already.

- Can you get that?

- Thank you!

- There you go.

- And there's two other kids.

They didn't make it.

- Two?

- Two.

- Ah, two more.

- There we go.

- Thank you.

- Thank you.

- They're in their house.

- We'll see y'all on Monday.

Have a great weekend.

(gentle serene music) I'm talking to a parent another day and I say, "You know, as teachers, we always say that 'Be ready to get out of school,' and kids always say they don't want school, you know, you end up missing your students."

(gentle serene music) It's strange that you don't see your students each and every day.

- How many you have?

- [Lady] One today.

- One?

Okay.

- [Carlos] Just one?

- Just one today.

- Cameron, come on.

How many more in there?

- Ah- - Come on boy!

(bus engine sputtering) Give me those two.

There, four.

- [Coach] Are you ready to go?

- [Carlos] Look, if you gotta be big and strong, you gotta eat everyday, you hear me?

You gotta eat everyday, okay?

Alright?

(bus engine sputtering) (bus door rattling) (gentle inspirational music) On my route alone, we gave out a total, the highest we gave out was 250 and that felt great.

And each day, it went up.

When we started on the first day, we gave out like 90.

And the next day, we gave out a hundred and something, then we got over to 250.

That they come to get it, so that's telling me that they want it and they need it.

- Desperate times call for desperate measures, and these are certainly desperate times in a lot of ways.

But I would say that our measures have been far more than those that represent just a desperate response.

They've been very heartfelt, very meaningful, very effective responses.

(gentle serene music) (bus engine sputtering) - They're way more than six, we got four right off the bat?

- [Coach Dennis] One.

- [Bus Lady] Two.

- [Parent] Thank you.

- [Bus Lady] I got some that's- - [Carlos] Add you two more?

- [Man] Uh-huh.

- [Coach Dennis] Alright, that's six.

How many more?

- [Man] Hand me four more.

- It was a great thing the administrator did for the school district and for the community as a whole because we're not feeding just people that's school age, we're feeding anybody from age zero to 18.

This time we're in now, with everything going on in the world, you can't get out like you're supposed to or like you been doing, and you ain't going to school so we don't know who need it and who don't need it.

So we fortunate that the school said, "Hey, we got the food to provide for kids."

- "Thank you," as a parent I would say, to our own local school district for this work.

And I'm sure that I speak for the parents across the state and the country who have children in public schools and who have benefited from the investment that they've continued to make when it would have been easy to go home and wait for the stay-at-home order to be lifted and resume life as normal.

They've stayed the course and been true to the mission of public education, which is about advancing our society, creating that educated, healthy workforce for the future.

And I'm grateful for that.

(gentle inspirational music) - I think it's important that they see that we still care about them and we still wanna make sure they're doing good in life and stuff and that it's just not about school, it's beyond school.

(gentle inspirational music) Which I think is great for the kids to see, "Hey, I go to a school district that cares about me and not just about my education.

They want to make sure I got everything I need to survive in life and they help to provide that for me."

(gentle inspirational music) I mean, I'm just the type of person that I'm gonna do whatever I need to do to help out the next person.

I grew up in Starkville so I know the need of the people in Starkville.

(gentle inspirational music progressing) A lot of folks need that meal throughout the day.

A lot of kids depend on that lunch.

It's a strange situation that we're dealing with now and as as a coach, we all would deal with adversity, and we're dealing with a lot of adversity right now because we don't know what the next day going to bring.

(gentle inspirational music) And as long as we do it, I'll be out there doing it.

And that's all I can do on my end.

So I hope as long as we out, we provide meals for the kids.

(gentle inspirational music progressing) (wedding guests chattering) (gentle serene music) (gentle serene music progressing) (Eudene laughing) (gentle lively music) (gentle serene music) (gentle serene music progressing) (wedding guests chattering) (wedding guest laughing) (gentle solemn music) (gentle solemn music progressing) - Spousal loss is devastating.

It can rock the world of the person left behind.

Oftentimes, older adults have been married for 50 years or more and they have done everything together.

From work in the garden, to going to town together, to planting the garden to start with, to going to church on Sundays, all their meals together, and when suddenly that's gone, it makes it more and more challenging to gain access to food.

(birds chirping) (gentle solemn music) - In the United States, there are about 53 million older adults, those 60 and above, who live with food insecurity.

That's about 7.3% of the older adult population in the United States.

In Mississippi, about 11.2% of our population lives with food insecurity.

So we think about older adults, and what's different about older adults from the general, maybe generally healthy population, And accessibility is where things start to break down.

Mobility is increasingly limited for older adults.

Older adults, as they age and become more ill and frail, are less able to get out and about.

For folks in rural areas who were used to growing their own food, that plays a very real, you know, when your ability to do that changes, and it diminishes year after year after year after year to a point where you're not able to grow anything anymore, I mean, wow, what a, again, stark reality, "that my life as I know it is significantly changed."

(animals screeching) (birds chirping) (gentle solemn music) (cabinet door squeaking) (cabinet items clattering) (cabinet door thudding) - [David] We also think about loneliness, and just a loss of appetite that comes with loneliness.

(gentle solemn music) (gentle solemn music progressing) - Look, we're not as motivated to eat in the same way when we don't have anyone to eat with, when those around our table are not there anymore.

But it starts in our home, in some cases for older adults, by loss of a spouse, and then the neighbor down the road, and the sister across town or across the county.

Those folks start to die and it suddenly becomes just yourself and one or two other folks, and then it's just yourself and one other folk, and then it's just yourself.

So that idea of the shrinking island is very real.

(lima beans simmering) (cutlery clattering) Solving this problem is certainly not something that we can do with a magic bullet, with a single shot.

(gentle solemn music) (cutlery clattering) Prevention, of course, would be our number one goal, prevent older adults from getting to that state of being.

But recognizing that while it may be difficult to reverse that cycle, it's not impossible.

We need to also think about what is it that we can do individually.

Paying attention to the older adults around us, and not just our own parents, but think about who else in your community.

Take that mental survey of who's around you, who might need help.

Not committing yourself to providing meals seven days a week, but maybe just think occasionally about what you could do to offer help to them.

Being mindful of that as a community member, as a friend, as a fellow church member, as someone as a neighbor, can make really all the difference.

It's gonna take a multi-disciplinary approach, approaches both governmental and non-governmental in nature, faith-based and secular, individual, collective, so all those sort of dichotomies that we think of, forget them.

We need to all work together to address food insecurity among older adults.

(pensive music)