Over the last five years, the Stop & Shop Food Pantry has donated more than $100-thousand in healthy food to see that students at Washington S.T.E.M. Elementary School in Lynn, Massachusetts, don’t come to school hungry. To celebrate this milestone, Boston Red Sox’s first baseman Triston Casas recently surprised the students and staff with 500 tickets to a Red Sox game at Fenway Park.
The in-school pantry at Washington S.T.E.M. opened in 2019 as part of the Stop & Shop School Food Pantry Program. To mark the pantry’s fifth anniversary, Stop & Shop’s Jennifer Barr presented a check for $22,500 to the school. Barr says the program has grown a lot over that time and now operates 235 in-school food pantries across five states in the Northeast.
During the anniversary celebration, which also included a Stop & Shop food truck handing out frozen treats and birthday party kits, Casas took pics with the students and praised them, saying, “You people do great work, I hear a lot of great things.” Along with the Red Sox ‘Strike Out School Hunger Program,’ the Stop & Shop Food Pantry is committed to making sure that hunger isn’t a barrier to learning at Washington S.T.E.M.