San Antonio Independent School District held a “mega” food drive on Wednesday ahead of spring break, when students and staff get a week off from school and families lose a crucial food safety net.
While students may welcome the time off, extended school breaks add stress to households: caregivers still have to work and food insecurity spikes because it means students no longer have access to reliable sources of food in school.
At SAISD, all students are eligible for free lunch and breakfast since all of its campuses have a high number of economically disadvantaged families.
While SAISD often holds smaller food drives on different campuses throughout the year and “mega” food drives before the Thanksgiving and winter breaks, Wednesday marked the first time district officials organized one right before spring break.
“We’re noticing on the registration forms that the need is high,” said Rita Sanchez, program coordinator for the district’s Family and Community Engagement (FACE) team at the event in the Alamo Stadium parking lot.
From 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. Wednesday, hundreds of cars lined up in the parking lot and volunteers from the University of Texas at San Antonio and military members from Lackland Air Force Base placed veggies, fruits and canned goods in people’s trunks.
Program staff have been flooded with inquiries about food distribution events and pantries since a federal government shutdown halted SNAP benefits last year, and SAISD’s Systems of Care website, where families can find different resources, has been seeing record traffic, especially leading up to school breaks, Sanchez said.
Irene Flores is a mother of two students, 18 and 14, at Advanced Learning Academy. Working as an administrative assistant for FACE, Flores said she has a tight food budget and often has to strictly portion her kids’ meals.
Flores was working during the food drive, signing volunteers in and helping with distribution, but had also registered for food assistance.
“Whatever they give us, I’ll try to make a meal out of it,” Flores said. “Because I’m a good cook, we can get through it.”
While SAISD’s mega food drives are marketed toward families enrolled in the district, any resident who meets the qualification to receive assistance from the San Antonio Food Bank can take advantage of the district’s food drives.
The scope of SAISD’s food drives are often determined by the availability of volunteers, said Sanchez. But the district could soon open up volunteer opportunities to individual community members and alumni groups.
SAISD served around 600 families on Wednesday, including Mauro Bobadilla, 73, who was there to pick up food for his high school daughter and wife; mother of five Ruth Villanueva who’s struggling financially; and Lisette Borrego, a newly single mother who was applying for a job and food stamps while waiting in the long car line.
Borrego has a preschooler at Bowden Academy and said she heard about the food drive that morning after getting a text from one of her student’s teachers.
“My daughter’s dad decided that he wasn’t going to help me with groceries anymore,” she said. “So this is a big help right now.”
Spring breaks are only a week long, running from March 9-13 at SAISD, but the summer months can be especially difficulty for families with school-aged children, particularly in the San Antonio area where roughly 21.1% of kids are food insecure, according to the nonprofit Children At Risk.
Like most area school districts, SAISD offers summer meals to children at several of its campuses, but dates and hours are limited and families may struggle with transportation.
During the summer, Flores said she leans on foods her kids can prepare quickly and on their own, like sandwiches and Hot Pockets, since she can’t always make it to the summer meals program.
Summer hunger is especially pronounced in Texas, where 17.6% of the population is food insecure and 1 in 4 children face hunger, according to No Kid Hungry Texas.
Texas has never used Summer EBT, a federally funded program created in 2023 that gives families an extra $40 per student per month during the summer break. Currently, 38 states are taking advantage of the program.
Working with a $330 billion state budget, Texas could receive $450 million in federal funds for Summer EBT. Last year, the state House Appropriations Committee even set aside $60 million to implement the program but the item was vetoed by Gov. Greg Abbott in June.
At the time, Abbott said there was “significant uncertainty regarding federal matching rates for this and other similar programs.”
“Once there is more clarity about the long-term fiscal ramifications for creating such a program, the Legislature can reconsider funding this item,” he said in a statement last year.
If the federal government raises the implementation costs, the line item could be slashed entirely.
An estimated 3.75 million children across Texas would’ve qualified for Summer EBT including 234,000 Bexar County students. No Kid Hungry Texas estimates that only 170,000 children are served through school summer meal programs across the entire state.
Since Abbott vetoed the measure, state and local officials have been putting pressure on the governor’s office to approve the funding item to get Summer EBT up and running by this year.
In December, San Antonio Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones wrote Abbott a letter asking him to fund the program.
While states had a Jan. 1, 2026 deadline to commit to covering the administrative costs needed to participate in the program, Texas could still go through with it if the governor gives the green light.
On a call with reporters on Jan. 28, state Rep. Armando Walle (D-Houston) who has been part of the powerful appropriations committee and has taken up the Summer EBT issue for the past two years, said there are funding mechanisms to fund the program despite the deadline.
“There are some budget mechanisms that can occur so we can ramp up the program for Summer 2026,” Walle said. “If the governor wants to, we can make it happen.”
