Summer is done, or just about, and students are shuffling back to the school to reflect on the freedom they have given up. Those long days outside the classroom, however, had the potential to erase all the educational progress made during the previous school year.
One Florida school district took it upon itself to prevent this from happening while also providing delicious nourishment along the way.
“We know kids forget a lot of what they learn over the summer. We are doing what we can to prevent that,” said Linda Cobbe, a spokeswoman for Pasco County School District.
Called the Feeding and Reading Program, the district, located outside Tampa in central Florida, sent out two school buses—one blue, one yellow—to provide books and bagged lunches for students to snack on in order to cultivate both minds and bodies during the extended break from school.
The brainchild of Pasco County Assistant Superintendent Ray Bonti came to fruition after Bonti overheard students at the daily summer lunch bus complain they had nothing to do.
Energized to provide a scholastic respite to the doldrums of summer, Bonti utilized a blue bus that sat unused and packed it with the numerous books in the district’s possession to offer students something to read as they ate.
Bonti believed that the addition of reading to filling students’ stomachs with hearty meals would provide the instructive sustenance necessary to bring them into the new school year eager to learn.
