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Fuel Up with Columbus City Schools During Remote Learning 

Columbus City Schools is changing the way it Fuels Up students when it comes to providing free breakfast and lunch as students prepare to start the 2020-2021 school year fully remote.

Beginning Wednesday, September 9, the District’s Food Services Department will expand its grab and go meal site locations to 44 sites across the District. Along with the site expansion, the food services department will launch a weekly meal pack pick-up cycle that will include five-days of grab and go meals while students are in a remote learning environment. 

Grab and Go meal sites will be assigned by the nearest location to the student’s home address. Meal pick-ups will take place every Wednesday at two times; 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., and in the evening from 5 to 7 p.m. Any child 18 and under can pick up a five-day meal pack. 

Since the start of our unprecedented Grab-and-Go Food Site effort at the beginning of this pandemic last March, our Food Services team has provided more than half-a-million meals to young people throughout our entire community. That’s hundreds-of-thousands of free healthy breakfasts and lunches that families didn’t have to worry about for their children as they struggled through the fear and uncertainty of this COVID-19 crisis.

Week 2 Update

Columbus City Schools continues to provide an unprecedented level of food service for our families during this COVID crisis. Remember, when the pandemic first closed our schools, we began our Grab-and-Go Food sites at 15 locations across the city and provided more than half-a-million meals during the Spring and Summer. That’s hundreds-of-thousands of healthy breakfasts and lunches that families didn’t have to worry about for their children as they struggled through the fear and uncertainty of this COVID crisis. BUT it also required that our families visit every day to get meals.

With the restart of school (when we are asking families to supervise daily learning at home), we had to find a way to make food pick-up more convenient and more effective for our families, so we moved to a five-day meal pack (five breakfasts and five lunches in one box to last a week). The move to a five-day pack means food must be shelf-stable (not cooked meals that last only hours or a day).

We also changed our hours, offering pick-up at lunchtime and in the early evening, to provide options as parents finish work for the day.

So far, this change has been well-welcomed by our families. During our second week of service, on September 16, we provided nearly a quarter-of-a-million meals to families - with nearly 15,000 meals at the Columbus Global Academy alone. And families have appreciated the early evening hours, with most of our meals handed out between 5-7pm.

Combined with our first week of Fuel Up Food Service, we have provided more than 361,000 meals. No other district in Central Ohio can match that number or that level of convenience for families.