EMERADO — In response to the local food pantry’s temporary closure, Emerado Elementary School has found ways to reduce food waste and meet the community’s needs.
Superintendent Cassaundra Riewer said the community may be small — with fewer than 400 people — but it has some real needs; approximately 60 families visited the food pantry each week. As a school leader, she feels it’s necessary to consider how students are impacted when their needs aren’t met.
“When students are hungry, it impacts learning; it impacts behavior and their overall wellbeing,” Riewer said. “If there are opportunities to support families beyond the classroom, we need to pay attention to them — and we need to reach out and find the opportunities.”
Cordilayne Meyer, assistant fire chief and director of the food pantry, closed the pantry earlier this year. Though there’s a good number of volunteers on distribution days, Meyer unloads truck deliveries by herself, and can no longer do so until she has fully recovered from recent surgeries.
She hopes to reopen by September or October, but intends to either find a more accessible location or make plans to have a pantry built.
Emerado Elementary School has approximately 90 students from preschool to eighth grade. For years, the school has offered resources like food to students and their families through the Bulldog Basics program.
After the food pantry closed, Riewer reached out to Mandy Burbank, of Grand Forks Public Health, to see how the school could help. The school has since started a meal repack program, arranged for free meal distribution during the summer and was awarded a school garden grant.
In late 2025,
Burbank assisted Grand Forks’ Head Start
with its own meal repack program, but Emerado Elementary School is the first school in the county to start one. The Great Plains Food Bank provided a freezer and one-year supply of to-go containers for the elementary school to get started.
Riewer said her school doesn’t often have food remaining after meals are served, but the occasional leftovers have added up to approximately 60 meals distributed to five families since the end of February.
“It’s not a lot, but it’s still something,” Riewer said. “Wasting food while families are struggling doesn’t sit right with me, so this program just allowed us to be part of the solution. Less waste, more impact. That’s a win for everybody.”
She feels hunger is a significant barrier in Emerado, and if she and her staff can help eliminate hunger while also reducing waste, it’s their responsibility to do so.
The school has also collaborated with the YMCA out of Fargo to provide free breakfast and lunch throughout the summer for kids ages 18 and younger. Families are invited to the school each Thursday from 11 a.m. to 11:30 a.m., starting June 11, to pick up a meal bag with frozen breakfasts and lunches to last until the following week.
The program will run until Aug. 13, with one week off during the Fourth of July, Riewer said.
Maranda Kranig, a fifth-grade teacher, has led the effort to bolster the school’s small garden by applying for a $1,000 grant. Kranig believes some of her students don’t understand the work of farmers, and that allowing them to experience what farmers do, on a smaller scale, will allow the kids to better understand their agricultural community.
Students are planting kale, carrots, garlic chives, bush beans, coneflowers, black-eyed Susans, catmint and ornamental grass.
Kranig tried to pick plants she felt were hearty and could make it through the summer with little supervision, since she felt it was important for the project to truly be in the students’ hands.
“The whole goal of this garden is that the students maintain it, not the adults, so they can feel that sense of leadership and have that sense of control over it, and understand how much work it does take to have a garden,” Kranig said.
With the grant, she was able to purchase gardening tools for the students, as well as a drip irrigation system that should maintain the water supply evenly throughout the summer months when students are out of school.
Kranig and Riewer see the garden as a stepping stone for Emerado, and they hope to build on the project by applying for a community garden grant.
“I hope that it’ll grow into something bigger, maybe like a community garden, or somewhere where the whole community could get produce and things out of it, and learn along the way,” Kranig said.
Dining and Cooking