A nonprofit that works to make sure New Kensington-Arnold School District students don’t go hungry on weekends is expanding its mission, and a district graduate is helping to make that happen.
Project SEED, which provides bags of food to children in need at the district’s Martin and H.D. Berkey elementary schools during the school year, will be creating a food pantry at the district’s third elementary school, Roy A. Hunt.
“SEED” stands for Something to Eat Every Day. Joanne Cecchi, a former New Kensington-Arnold teacher and administrator, started it in 2013 with Ruth Carson, a teacher and reading specialist in the district. They both retired in 2008; Carson died in 2016.
Martin houses students in pre-kindergarten and kindergarten in New Kensington, while first and second grades are at Berkey in Arnold. About half of the 525 students at those schools get food through the project.
The pantry at Hunt, in Arnold, will be available to the nearly 750 students in third through sixth grade.
While teachers at Martin and Berkey discreetly give food to students on Fridays, Cecchi said a pantry is being built at Hunt because the school operates differently — students don’t start and end their days in the same classrooms with the same teachers.
The pantry will be located in a room next to the school’s library, an area that had been a shop when the building was a junior high school.
Once it is built, she said, students will be able to go to the pantry on Fridays without their classmates knowing, put the food they want in their backpacks and go back to class.
“It’s a way to get those kids some food for the weekend,” said Cecchi, who lives in Allegheny Township. “The kids will be able to go in and take four or five things, put it in a grocery bag, put it in their backpack and take it home with them.”
The school board recently approved the pantry’s creation. When it will be up and running was not yet known.
Brian Krainbucher, a 1990 Valley High School graduate, volunteered to build shelving for the pantry. He owns Krain Construction, which he started while a student in 1988 and runs from his home in Murrysville.
Starting with building decks and roofing when he was 16, Krainbucher has grown his business to building custom homes. A student at Hunt when the school housed seventh and eighth grades, he took shop and drafting where the pantry will be.
Krainbucher was never a student of Cecchi’s but has known her since he was in ninth grade. She first hired him to do work on her home 20 to 25 years ago.
“Every time it seems like I need something to make my program work, someone steps up,” Cecchi said. “There’s so many people pitching in to make this program successful.”
A father of two boys, ages 3 and 5, Krainbucher said he was shocked to learn through Cecchi of the hunger problem in the community. He grew up two blocks away from the Hunt building, just across the city line in New Kensington.
“It really touched me pretty deep I get to help in some way,” he said. “I had no idea the children are suffering as much as they are when it comes to hunger.”
The pantry, which Cecchi said will be set up like a tiny grocery store, also will be part of lessons for Hunt’s life skills students, who are expected to help run it by stocking shelves and keeping inventory.
Hunt’s acting principal, Todd Kutchak, said the pantry is needed.
“We have kids who are less fortunate who do go hungry,” he said. “I think this will start a little slow, but it will pick up.”