The shelves lining the walls inside the Tide Me Over storage room are packed with food from floor to ceiling. It takes a lot to provide two days worth of food to more than 100 local students each weekend.
The program, run by First Baptist Church, is able to provide food for students at Charlotte Upper Elementary School thanks to the continued generosity of the greater-Charlotte community. The most recent act of kindness came from the Charlotte Lions Club, which recently presented the program with a generous donation.
“The Lions Club is very concerned for children and families in our community that rely on the Tide Me Over program,” said Lions Club president, Linda Rushing. “How can we expect children to function in school if they are hungry or thinking about what they are going to eat over the weekend.”
Rushing said the donation is a small way of showing support for a program that is providing an extremely important service.
“Those children are tomorrow’s leaders in our community,” Rushing said. “We need to support these kinds of programs.”
The Tide Me Over program provides food to children at Charlotte Upper Elementary School to help tide them over throughout the weekend. More than 50 percent of students attending Charlotte Public Schools qualify for the free and reduced lunch program. Many of those students are not able to get enough food over the course of a weekend.
The tide me over program was created to help fill that gap. In 2012-13, the program’s first year, 2,231 bags of food were distributed to an average of 72 students. The program expanded in 2013-14 to include students in sixth grade, brining the average number of students to more than 100 each week at a cost of $5 per bag.
