School Lead Role Description
We are so thankful that you are the School Lead for the Portland Backpack program. We recognize that your time is precious, so we make every effort to do what we can to support you.
School Lead Role
Maintain the list of students receiving the food sacks at your school. Portland Backpack will never need to see this list.
Before the start of school, you will inform Portland Backpack of the number of food sacks needed. You may request changes to your enrollment number through this enrollment update form .
PB will provide a sign-up form for you to use in the fall. You can print and send out in the fall with other back-to-school information or convert to be used electronically. This will be provided in multiple languages.
PB can provide Halal food sacks and nut free snacks by request.
We encourage you to collaborate with teachers and family support staff to identify those kids who should be included on the list.
The school distribution list is expected to be kept up to date and available for other school leaders in case you are unavailable on any distribution day.
Each food sack is for one child. If you have multiple kids from one family at your school, each child will get to take a food sack home.
Serve as the primary communication partner with Portland Backpack staff
Although you are the primary program lead, you will need a back up so that if you are absent the food sack distribution can still take place. This ensures that kids get their food sacks every week.
We have a program evaluation for families to give feedback at the end of the year. We will need your support to distribute this to families. We have created the evaluation in multiple languages, such as Arabic, Chinese, Korean, Russian, Spanish, Somali, Swahili, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese. Please share links with families.
We have a demographic survey for families to complete. Please distribute and encourage families to complete.
Distribute food sacks on Thursday or Friday
Please let the Associate Director know if you would like help finding volunteers to assist with the distribution.
We strongly suggest using older students with leadership abilities to help distribute the sacks. This helps with diminishing the stigmatization of the sacks and promotes kids supporting kids.
We provide an assortment of menus. We encourage you to try to alternate one week of each to give the kids variation. We certainly understand this isn’t always possible.
With support from PB, maintain the food bin storage area.
Before school begins, PB will meet with the school principal/vice principal and assign a storage space for the food bins. We ask that this space be able to hold 2 weeks’ worth of food bins to accommodate our delivery schedule plus one week extra to have on hand in case of a snow day or other scheduling issue.
It is helpful for food bins to be organized by menu. Since you may be using partial bins each week, the food bins need to be checked to see if they are full or not.
Portland Backpack bins are to ONLY be used for Portland Backpack food.
Food Sack Information
Every sack includes two breakfast items, two snacks, two servings of fruit, and two meal items. There are an assortment of menus for the protein meals, so the bins are labeled with one of the menu names.
All food provided is shelf stable.
Each food sack is intended for one child.
There are 8 food sacks in each bin
Halal sacks are always packed in a purple plastic sack. They include two protein meal items that are certified halal in addition to the basics provided in all food sacks.
Please request any special menus and we will do our best to accommodate when possible.