Just inside the front office at Mooroopna Park Primary School sits a trestle table covered in food.
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Apples, bags of carrots, tins of soup and long-life milk are among the items waiting to be picked up by families who need extra help keeping the cupboards stocked.
The school, which ranks in the top three per cent of disadvantaged schools in the country, has been providing access to extra food for families for about two years.
As the school holidays begin there’s a rush to make sure the most vulnerable families are stocked up so they can last through the break.
Staff are all too aware that some families may struggle to access food while school is out.
Back in 2019, Mooroopna Park Primary started offering free lunch and snacks to students — on top of the free breakfast already available — because staff noticed kids coming to school without food, or with food that lacked nutrition.
School business manager Tina Cameron said the school began offering food for families to take home when staff realised the need went beyond the school day.
“We also had kids telling us that they didn’t have dinner,” Ms Cameron said.
Some kids were going without food over the weekend, she said.
Since the school started offering additional food, the need has ramped up.
“Demand has definitely increased,” Ms Cameron said.
She said more families were seeking food assistance at the school this year, and requests were also more frequent.
Families at Mooroopna Park Primary are not alone in their experience of food insecurity.
Food assistance organisations say they’re seeing unprecedented demand in Greater Shepparton, and they’re struggling to keep up.
“Without any exaggeration, it’s just like nothing we’ve ever seen before,” Shepparton FoodShare chair Jeremy Rensford said.
He said this year’s food distribution numbers were the highest in kilos that the organisation had seen in its 12 years of operation.
There were spikes in demand during the pandemic and after the floods, but Mr Rensford said he had never seen such a prolonged period of elevated need as he was seeing in the community right now.
“The kind of demand we have now is different to a disaster,” he said.
Mr Rensford said the housing crisis and the steep rise in the cost of living were contributors to the rise in the number of families suffering from food insecurity.
But he said the biggest factor was the steep increase in the cost of filling up the trolley.
Families that have a finite budget for food were simply not getting as much as they used to, he said.
Mr Rensford said the need was currently so great that Shepparton FoodShare, which distributes food donations to over 100 partner groups in the region, wasn’t getting enough to fill the void and was having to ration supplies.
The strain in regional Victoria, and across the state, is noted in submissions to a state parliamentary inquiry into food security.
Both Greater Shepparton City Council and the Community Hubs of Hume and Greater Shepparton have sounded the alarm in local submissions to the inquiry.
“Many Community Hub families must choose between food, rent, utilities, medication and other basic needs, as current incomes are not sufficient for cost-of-living pressures,” the local Community Hub submission stated.
“Supply is much lower than demand,” Meg Pethybridge said. She is the author of the submission on behalf of the local Community Hubs.
Ms Pethybridge said food assistance groups that usually helped Community Hub clients couldn’t get enough food to satisfy demand.
Sometimes staff have to tell clients that they will have to come back and try again another day.
“It breaks your heart,” she said.
The council submission to the inquiry cited a 21 per cent increase in Food Bank distributions.
It also noted that it was a challenge for food assistance programs to provide culturally appropriate options for the highly multicultural community in the area.
Recommendations to the state from local government and organisations included providing more support for culturally appropriate food assistance, supporting the establishment of community gardens and urban farms to increase localised food production, and working to help food producers strengthen resilience to respond to a changing climate.
Implementing a free school lunch program across the state could also help, the Community Hub submission stated.
The report from the inquiry is expected by late November.
Without solutions, both big and small, Mr Rensford said things at Shepparton FoodShare could get worse.
“There’s serious risks that we’re going to be compromised in some way, shape or form in our ability to function at full capacity,” he said.
Mr Rensford noted that FoodShare did not have guaranteed funding and relied on the community to stay afloat.
He said the organisation was exceptionally grateful for the support it received through food donations, volunteering and financial support.
Small solutions such as food drives made a difference, Mr Rensford said.
On the macro level, he said a grassroots response and collaboration among local service providers were key.
“We can’t just sit and wait for state government to help,” he said.
Research shows that food insecurity has large impacts on mental health and overall wellbeing, influencing things such as stress levels, cognitive function, nutrition, and health.
Mooroopna Park Primary School has seen the relationship between food and wellbeing first-hand.
Ms Cameron said staff saw positive changes when their free lunch program ensured kids were going to class with full bellies.
The school saw improvements in attendance, engagement and behaviour.
Ms Cameron said families had also given positive feedback, saying access to food had relieved stress.
Senior Journalist