By NEAL WAGNER / Managing Editor

ALABASTER – The Alabaster City School System will continue providing thousands of free meals to area children this summer, as it will again hold its summer feeding program at two schools throughout June and July.

Beginning on June 5 and ending July 29, ACS will hold its summer feeding program at Meadow View Elementary School and Thompson Intermediate School. Through the summer feeding program the past three years, ACS has provided free breakfast and lunch to children, and has offered meals for adults for a few dollars per meal.

Kids 18 and younger eat for free, and adults can eat breakfast for $2 and lunch for $4.

ACS will provide breakfast and lunch each weekday from June 5-July 29 except for July 3-4 because of the Independence Day holiday.

The school system also will continue its Warrior Wheels program this summer, which allows ACS to distribute summer meals to sites throughout the city each day.

In 2015, the ACS Child Nutrition Department applied for and received a $50,000 grant from the Community Foundation of Greater Birmingham and the United Way of Central Alabama to purchase a new bus to deliver the meals to sites such as Kids First Awareness Community Center, the Alabaster YMCA and the Episcopal Church of Alabaster.

As a result of adding the Warrior Wheels program last summer, the school system was able to greatly increase the number of meals it provides to area children each day during the summer.

“We served 43,173 meals this past summer due to the ability to purchase a delivery vehicle with this grant,” said Alabaster Schools CNP Manager Heather McDermott, noting the school system served more than 1,700 meals on some days last summer. “This is a 30,808 meal increase over the summer of 2015. That is an increase of 249 percent.”

Anyone interested in volunteering at one of the meal sites, or offering a new site for Warrior Wheels to serve should contact McDermott at 663-8460.