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NISD Serving Free Meals Over Spring Break

For the first time, Northside Independent School District is serving free breakfast and lunch over spring break. Students don’t have to be enrolled in NISD to enjoy a meal, and parents can eat too.

 

The year round free and reduced breakfast and lunch program is federally funded, but the district is paying for the spring break meals.  Thomas Wherry is Director of Child Nutrition Services at NISD.  He says 50 percent of children in the district are on free and reduced lunch, and when school is out, students are still hungry. Weary says he expects 600 meals to be served over the week.

Meals are being served at Mary Hull and Martin Elementary Schools.  Breakfast is from 8 to 9am and lunch is 11am to noon.

Louisa Jonas is an independent public radio producer, environmental writer, and radio production teacher based in Baltimore. She is thrilled to have been a PRX STEM Story Project recipient for which she produced a piece about periodical cicadas. Her work includes documentaries about spawning horseshoe crabs and migratory shorebirds aired on NPR's Weekend All Things Considered. Louisa previously worked as the podcast producer at WYPR 88.1FM in Baltimore. There she created and produced two documentary podcast series: Natural Maryland and Ascending: Baltimore School for the Arts. The Nature Conservancy selected her documentaries for their podcast Nature Stories. She has also produced for the Chemical Heritage Foundation’s Distillations Podcast. Louisa is editor of the book Backyard Carolina: Two Decades of Public Radio Commentary. She holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from University of North Carolina Wilmington. Her training also includes journalism fellowships from the Science Literacy Project and the Knight Digital Media Center, both in Berkeley, CA. Most recently she received a journalism fellowship through Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution where she traveled to Toolik Field Station in Arctic Alaska to study climate change. In addition to her work as an independent producer, she teaches radio production classes at Howard Community College to a great group of budding journalists. She has worked as an environmental educator and canoe instructor but has yet to convince a great blue heron to squawk for her microphone…she remains undeterred.