ORANGE PARK – Teachers at W.E. Cherry Elementary are doing all they can to make life feel normal for its students in these not-so-normal times.

Florida statute dictates that when schools are closed for holidays, students aren’t able to eat at the school. Nobody is eating lunch at schools in Clay County these days due to the coronavirus but every school in the district is handing out food in a drive-thru-like style vehicle loop that allows parents and students to pick up food. They aren’t able to do so on the days where school is closed though but that isn’t stopping W.E. Cherry.

“We here have 100% free and reduced lunch meaning all of our students get lunch and breakfast for free,” W.E. Cherry principal Angie Whiddon said. “Once this virus started, we noticed right off the bat that there were three [holidays] where kids would not be getting food.”

Whiddon said those students still needed food those days and so school faculty members put together enough money to purchase enough pizza to cover 200 lunches.

It didn’t end there. On the second holiday where students would have otherwise not been fed by the school, Eason and Whiddon reached out to 4 Rivers Smokehouse in Orange Park and asked for some help feeding their students.

“They provided 200 boxed lunches that day at no cost to the school,” Eason said. “They did it out of the kindness of their hearts.”

Faculty got together shortly after that to write a grant to Sam’s Club asking for help providing lunches to students. Eason said it usually takes about two weeks for grant approval and six weeks to receive the check. It took a total of nine days.

“They gave us $1500 and with that, we were able to provide 200 lunches and breakfasts to our students,” Whiddon said.

The school has, so far, provided 600 lunches and 150 breakfasts. Eason and Whiddon were able to use leftover money from Sam’s Club to help purchase supplies they knew students and their families needed. They were even able to come up with enough money between what was leftover and what staff and community members were able to donate to pay the rent of one family’s living situation. They were at risk of eviction otherwise, Eason said.

This kind of help is engrained throughout the school and surrounding area. Pre-K teacher Ivy Lowery helped organize buying lunch from Olive Garden for Orange Park Medical Center’s ICU team. Faculty, students and parents have been hanging white ribbons on their homes in show of support for everyone on the frontlines of this virus. Eason and Orange Park Junior High teacher Glenn Hair have been 3-D printing face mask straps for doctors and nurses designed to relieve the stress that the face mask strings and straps create on the wearer’s ears.

“You ask why but ‘why not?’ is the question?” Whiddon said. “We know our kids. We know our student population. We know that if we can take one more source of stress out of their life, even if only for a few days, it’s something we’re going to do.

“We’re just trying to keep their lives as normal as we can in an un-normal time.”