Local students rise up to help area's hungry

SANDPOINT — Kootenai and Farmin-Stidwell elementary students got a rise out of helping out the hungry earlier this month, baking bread to donate to local soup kitchens.

King Arthur Flour’s Bake for Good program recently came to town to teach the kids not only how to bake bread from scratch, but also a lesson in helping out their community.

“They (the kids) thought it was so cool to be able to give the bread to people in need,” said Betsy Dalessio, “They worked so hard on it to make their final product — and then of course they got to eat it, too.”

Pam Jensen, a Bake for Good instructor from Utah, is the grandmother of a Kootenai Elementary fourth-grader, so she saw an opportunity to come to North Idaho to visit family and teach the kids some valuable skills, said Kootenai Elementary Principal Kelli Knowles. If more than 50 kids participate, the company sends a representative to host an assembly. King Arthur has a video option for smaller groups as well, Dalessio said.

Jensen reached out to the grade schools in the district to see if any were interested, and Kootenai and Farmin-Stidwell signed up. More than 200 fourth- through sixth-grade students from each school participated in the program on Feb. 15.

The assemblies were set up to resemble a cooking show, with a camera and two student assistants at each school. The student assistants were chosen for the position after being nominated by their teachers to help out. The camera allowed all the students in the two assemblies to see a close-up of what Jensen was doing as she demonstrated how to prepare the dough for baking. They put together the recipe, and while they didn’t bake the loaves of bread during the assemblies, Jensen had one already done for the kids to see what it looks like after it rises, Dalessio said.

“Then she showed them the different options they could do — they could braid it, or turn it into cinnamon rolls or pizza dough — all these different things, so that was really cool,” Dalessio said.

Each student who participated was sent home with a cloth bag full of supplies, including white flour, whole wheat flour, yeast, a recipe book, a kneading tool, and a plastic bag to put the bread in after baking it. The only ingredients they had to add from home were oil and sugar, Knowles said. The items for the kits were sent to the schools ahead of Jensen’s arrival, and Dalessio said the kids were “super excited” to see the pallet of flour arrive in the hall.

The kits had enough supplies for the kids to bake two loaves of bread, and they were instructed to bake with their families over the weekend and bring one loaf back to be donated. The Bonner Community Food Bank then collected the bread and distributed it to soup kitchens around the community. The following week, Farmin-Stidwell students brought in more than 100 loaves for donation, Dalessio said. Knowles estimated Kootenai students brought back between 150 and 175 loaves for donation. Knowles said February was unofficially dubbed “Kindness Month” at Kootenai Elementary to help brighten up the dark winter month with something fun. The Bake for Good program fit right in with that effort, she said, because it taught the kids about kindness and helping people in the community.

“What I didn’t think about until afterward was the kids got a chance to bake with their families,” Knowles said. “So they had family time, and learned to do an activity that also incorporated science and math — that was an added bonus.”

Mary Malone can be reached by email at mmalone@bonnercountydailybee.com and follow her on Twitter @MaryDailyBee.