McDowell County Schools opens sign-up for free summer meal boxes

A free box of summer meals is now on the table for McDowell County families, with McDowell County Schools offering home delivery from June 15 through August 4 to help bridge the gap when school breakfast and lunch end.

The district posted that registration was open for the program through its website and live-feed updates, and it said May 22 was the deadline to sign up. After noting that the original registration link had broken, the district posted a repaired link and reminded families that applications could not be accepted after the cutoff.

The pitch is straightforward: bring the food to the home, cut out the drive, and keep children fed through the summer. That approach matters in a county where getting to a school or store can mean a long trip, and where transportation, distance and grocery costs can all make a simple meal harder to secure.

West Virginia’s Summer Food Service Program is the federal framework behind that effort. The state Department of Education says the program provides free, nutritious meals to children 18 and younger in lower-income areas during the summer, with meals served at schools, parks, camps, housing complexes, churches and town halls, or prepared at one location and transported to another. State resources also include a sample home-delivery request and consent form, which fits the way McDowell County is handling this year’s summer feeding push.

The need in McDowell County is stark. The West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy’s 2024 KIDS COUNT data book says 38.1% of children in the county live in poverty, one in three children under 18 do not have enough to eat, and the median household income is $28,235. Feeding America’s Map the Meal Gap estimates say 1,170 children in McDowell County were food insecure in 2020, with a child food insecurity rate of 31.5% and an annual food budget shortfall of $2,098,000.

This is not the first time the district has used home delivery to meet that need. In 2025, Superintendent Kristen Barker said McDowell County Schools would offer 10-day meal boxes shipped to students’ homes because many families struggle to get to schools to pick up food. That earlier effort now appears to have become a regular part of the district’s summer support strategy.

State officials have pointed to the same pressure across West Virginia. The Department of Education said more than 400 Summer Food Program sites served children in 2025, and that an average of 204,115 children, about 86% of schoolchildren, receive free or reduced-price meals during the school year. For McDowell County, the home-delivered boxes are a practical answer to a basic problem: when school doors close, the need to eat does not.