When St. Timothy Episcopal Church in Chehalis was bequeathed shares of an oil company from a church member last spring, the church’s vestry board struggled to decide what the best use of the money would be.
“Our church is very much about doing what’s best for the Earth, so we really struggled with this very generous gift,” said Jessica Strickland, senior warden for St. Timothy Episcopal Church.
The board ultimately decided it wanted to use the money to benefit children in the community, and a member suggested paying down student lunch debt in the Chehalis School District as a way to do that.
“I was like, ‘We really should do it for the entire county, because we’re the only Episcopal church in the county,’” Strickland said. “Granted, at this point, we were all very ignorant of how much debt there was going to be.”
Several school districts in Lewis County, including the Mossyrock, Toledo and Onalaska school districts, qualify for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Community Eligibility Provision (CEP), which is a non-pricing meal service option for schools and school districts in low-income areas.
Others, namely schools in the Adna, Chehalis, Morton and Napavine school districts, do not.
As of May 2023, each of those schools had hundreds of dollars of outstanding student lunch debt. The Morton School District had the lowest debt of the four schools at $802.78. The Napavine School District had $885 in lunch debt as of last spring, Adna School District had $8,406.65, and the Chehalis School District had the highest debt amount at $12,239.
“And that’s even after donations that they have received from community businesses,” Strickland said of the Chehalis School District.
That debt is all from W.F. West High School, Strickland said, since the elementary and middle schools in the district all qualify for CEP.
The Centralia School District qualified for CEP this year, but had $82.90 in outstanding student lunch debt from the previous year, according to Strickland.
Pandemic-related waivers that allowed for universal free meals in public schools nationwide expired at the start of the 2022-23 school year, returning school meals back to normal operations, according to the Washington Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI).
In an Education Data Initiative report last updated in July 2023, the U.S. Department of Education formally estimated the national public school meal debt is $262 million a year, with Washington state’s public schools carrying $51,427,656 of that debt.
Legislation recommended by OSPI that, if passed, would allocate funding toward “providing free school meals for all” was introduced in the state Legislature in January 2023.
In the spring of 2023, St. Timothy Episcopal Church donated a total of $10,082.90 to schools in Lewis County, giving $5,000 each to the Chehalis and Adna school districts to pay down those large amounts of student lunch debt and paying off Centralis’s full debt of $82.90.
“However, that still leaves $12,333.63 of unpaid student debt in Lewis County school districts,” Strickland said. “To know there was still so much that was still there even after we paid quite a bit of it just absolutely shocked us … That galvanized us after we sat with our shock for a while.”
To initiate a larger campaign to pay off the rest of that debt, the church reached out to United Way of Lewis County and other potential community partners to see if one of them could spearhead the operation.
“Basically everybody said, ‘This is a great idea, but it’s too big of a project for us,’” Strickland recalled.
St. Timothy Episcopal Church has since set up an account specifically for paying down outstanding student lunch debt, and is asking community members to donate toward the cause.
“It is our mission that no child should be hungry at school; it is our belief that a child can’t learn on an empty stomach,” Strickland said.
The church itself has pledged to donate $500 a month to the account, which will be divided between the four districts with known outstanding student lunch debt — Chehalis, Adna, Morton and Napavine — in the spring.
As of Wednesday, Strickland was still waiting to hear back from the Pe Ell, White Pass and Winlock school districts for details on their student lunch debt situations.
Donations can be made online at tinyurl.com/GiveStTimothyChehalis or through the Tithely app, both of which allow donors to specify which school they want their donation to benefit.
“So far, we’ve only raised $25 for Morton,” Strickland said Wednesday.
Cash or check donations can also be mailed or hand-delivered to St. Timothy Episcopal Church, located at 1826 SW Snively Ave, Chehalis.
Questions can be directed to Strickland or Rev. Kay Flores at sttimothychehalis@gmail.com.
