With some area schools cutting their universal free meals programs for the upcoming school year, the Boca Raton Helping Hands’ KidsPack Weekend Meal Program will remain alive and functioning.
The program sends free, easy-to-prepare food home with students every Friday at 15 Boca elementary schools. Children who are eligible for the program are simply identified by their schools. No paperwork or income level is required by parents to qualify.
Helping Hands is funded totally by donations and has been in existence for 15 years. Some $500,000 of supplemental food assistance is distributed to Boca Raton students at partner schools annually.
Andrew Hagen, CEO of Boca Helping Hands, hopes that KidsPack will help fill the gap created by the loss of the universal free meals program. He said, “We will continue to stand with our schools and families as these changes take effect, and we hope our program can help make up for any loss of weekday school meals. Thanks to the generosity of our supporters, we provide weekend meals to students in 15 schools at a cost of more than half a million dollars each year.”
Hagen suggests that parents with children who may be losing their universal free meals eligibility fill out an application for the 2026-27 program anyway. He is on record as stating that universal free meals are “…the first line of defense against childhood hunger”. Hagen refers to the Helping Hands KidsPack program as a “complement” to not a“replacement” of the universal free meals program.
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