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The Whatley Center at Northeast Texas Community college announced this week that it will postpone its spring 2021 reopening to march. Initial plans were to resume with limited-capacity events beginning in January. Due to the continued rise of COVID-19 cases in the area, the season has been tentatively pushed back until March.

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No Kid Hungry Texas this week announced its first ever Rural School District Cohort, a partnership with the Texas Rural Education Association to address childhood hunger in rural communities. Five school districts across the state will participate in the year-long program, designed to support peer-to-peer collaboration and innovation around the unique challenges and opportunities associated with feeding students in rural school districts. No Kid Hungry Texas awarded a $30,000 grant to each school district to expand and improve their child nutrition programs. The cohort will bring together the child nutrition director from each district to share best practices and then adapt them locally with their own team. “The nutrition programs proven to effectively feed hungry kids can still work in rural communities, but they often must operate differently to account for the geographic landscape and the unique challenges rural families are dealing with,” said No Kid Hungry Texas Director Stacie Sanchez Hare. “This collaboration is an investment in sharing and developing solutions to those challenges so that kids in the most remote parts of our great state can still count on nutritious food.” “The Texas Rural Education Association is excited to partner with No Kid Hungry Texas in the first of its kind, Rural School District Cohort. TREA serves over 400 school districts in Texas, and we provide numerous benefits and services to our membership. We are honored to be able to work with No Kid Hungry to assist our membership in learning about childhood hunger and provide them with valuable resources to combat it,” said Bill Tarleton, Executive Director of Texas Rural Education Association The following school districts were selected to participate in the first No Kid Hungry Texas Rural School District Cohort: Mexia ISD, Mount Pleasant ISD, Navasota ISD, Sinton ISD, and Cotulla ISD. Even prior to the coronavirus pandemic, childhood hunger was a huge problem in many rural parts of the country: 84% of U.S. counties with the highest rate of childhood hunger are rural, according to the USDA. Now that much of rural America has been devastated by the coronavirus pandemic from a health and economic perspective, we expect that disparity has grown.