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Schools have shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and many students are unable to receive breakfast and lunch. As a solution, counties allow students to pick up packaged meals from various distribution locations. Specifically, Fairfax County, Virginia, a county with over 1.1 million residents, has a Grab & Go Food Distribution Program that provides meals to Fairfax County Public Schools' students. The program operates by dropping off meals directly to vehicles at distribution locations. It also delivers meals through bus stops.
I learned about the food distribution program through a friend that was using it. I also learned that Fairfax County had distributed over 1 million meals during school closings (March - July 2020). This statistic made me curious about program, and I reached out to the Operations Director of Fairfax County Public Schools Food Distribution Services to learn more. She told me about how the program worked and graciously agreed to provide me with meal distribution data when I asked if I could analyze it.
The data showed the number of meals provided in distribution sites over March - July 2020.
Using that data, I analyzed how the Fairfax County Public School system distributed meals to populations below the poverty line and impacted by COVID-19.
If you are in Fairfax County and need meals, please click here to find the nearest meal resource to your location.
Image Credit: Fairfax County Public Schools
The graph above is a map in which the darker a zip code is, the more meals distributed, populations below poverty level, and COVID-19 cases there are. For example, the zip code 22306 is dark in all three maps, which means that because that area has a higher population below the poverty level and COVID-19 cases, more meals were distributed there. In contrast, an area like 22003 had high populations below the poverty level and COVID-19 cases but fewer meals were distributed.
Image Credit: Fairfax County Public Schools
The graph above compares the population below poverty level to meals distributed per zip code. This graph has a trend line that was derived from the data—zip codes below the line are red because they are underserved in comparison to the other zip codes. 22306 has received over 200 thousand meals with around 4,000 people under the poverty line. 22033, which has nearly the same number of people under the poverty level as 22306, only received 75 thousand meals.
Similar to the populations below poverty graph, the graph above compares the number of COVID-19 cases to the number of meals distributed per zip code. Zip codes like 22306 and 20170 have enough meals, while zip codes like 22003 need around 75,000 more meals to be served on the same average.
There were several areas like 22309, 22041, and 22003 that had lower meals distributed relative to their high COVID-19 cases and high poverty levels, which is a strong indication that they are being underserved. There are several reasons why some areas receive more meals than others. For example, there could be a lack of transportation to travel to the distribution sites in some zip codes. There could also be lack of knowledge about the program.
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