Students from St Paul’s Open School seal pouches of emergency food aid for Kids Against Hunger, a national organization that mobilizes schoolchildren to support emergency relief efforts in America and around the world.

Each pouch makes a “hot dish” for 8 made of rice, dried chicken broth and vitamins, soy protein, 7 kinds of dried vegetables.

Kids work in teams of four, each one putting a different ingredient in the bags using a large funnel. Teachers and high school-age students circulate around the Open School gym giving advice and helping out.

The gym at Open is a filled with excited shouts, laughter, and loud music. It’s almost like the students are having a party.

Tim Leone-Getten, a ELL teacher at Open, has organized this event and several more like it over the last several years at Open.

At a similar event earlier this year, Leone-Getten says, Open Students pakced 47,000 meals.

Every Open student gets in on the act, working in five, 50 minute-long shifts. Some help move boxes and load meals into a waiting tractor-trailer, but most fill, seal, and pack bags. At shift-change, the third-floor hallway is a mad traffic jam as one grade returns to class and another takes their place.

Sullaiman and Ceyairra guard the gym door. No-one gets in without hand-sanitizer and a hairnet or a hat.

Faith, the sister of Assistant Principal Al Levin, first connected Leone-Getten to the Kids Against Hunger Program’s Stewart, Minnesota chapter. She helps coordinate a similar program with the same Kids Against Hunger chapter at Highlands Elementary School in Edina, where her children go to school.

John Neisen, the “volunteer director, oil changer, and truck driver,” as he put it, of the local Kids Against Hunger chapter was on hand to help. Kids Against Hunger is entirely volunteer-run, Neisen said, and pack all their food aid through events like these. According to their brochure, the Stewart chapter of K.A.H. packed 6.5 million meals last year ; since 2003, they have pacekd 16.5 million. “The number keeps going up every year,” Niesen said.

Most of the food packed on Friday will go to Haiti, but increasingly, Neisen said, more of the food they pack stays in the US, donated to local food pantries struggling to meet rising demand.