Roane State opens food pantry in Morgan County

“We’re excited to have students back on campus. Summer months are slow with no classes here, so we’re excited to have students back,” said Morgan County Campus Director Melody Kees. “We’re trying to generate some excitement for campus and be part of the community.”

The student food pantry is open to any Roane State student from any campus. The free pantry has grocery items, diapers and school supplies. Students will scan a QR code and provide household demographic information before shopping; the school collects the data to help keep grant funding for the project.

“We felt like we had a need in our community,” Kees said. “One of our biggest campuses is the web-based classes, so there’s a lot of students in Morgan County that take classes online who may need assistance, so we thought this would be an opportunity to help them out.”

The larger campuses in the Roane State Community College system, including Harriman, Oak Ridge and Cumberland County, have food pantries, but Kees said they wanted to lead the way in bringing the service to the smaller campuses like the one in Wartburg.

Roane State President Chris Whaley said it is important for the school to meet as many student needs as possible, not limited only to their classes. Meeting needs outside the classroom can lead to more success inside the classroom.

“One of the things we know about our students is many of them are food insecure. It’s not the situation, maybe, that they don’t have anything to eat, but they don’t often have enough to eat, or they don’t take time to eat, or any number of things,” Whaley said. “Our folks have been so passionate about making food available at our campuses.”

The campus has given students access to snacks and other food items in the past, but to have a dedicated food pantry where students can find something to eat while at school, or have groceries they can take home to prepare a meal, can make a major difference.

“It takes one thing off them they don’t have to be stressed about. They’re stressed about the classes they’re in, two or three jobs they have; hopefully we can remove one of those stresses so they can say, ‘alright, I don’t have to worry about groceries, because I know I can go by the food pantry and pick things up and make food tonight,’ ” Whaley said.

“We know from every single study of higher education, there’s a direct correlation between support services like this and student success. You can’t study if you’re hungry. You just can’t concentrate. This isn’t the silver bullet fix for everybody, but it’s one important thing to make sure more students are successful.”