Soon after taking over as Human Services director over a year ago, Elisa Neira began hearing from teachers and nurses in some of Princeton’s elementary schools that children were coming to school on Mondays sick, tired, or hungry. They probably hadn’t had breakfast, the teachers and nurses concluded. And quite possibly, they hadn’t had enough to eat over the weekend.

From that information and some convincing data, Ms. Neira and Ross Wishnick of the town’s Human Services Commission realized that there are a significant number of children in Princeton who are “food insecure,” meaning they don’t always have food available. While 12 percent of the local school population qualifies for free or subsidized school lunches during the week, there was no help available to them during the weekends.

Send Hunger Packing Princeton (SHUPP), based on a national program, was officially inaugurated on June 9, 2013 with a fundraiser at the Garden Theater, and the program was off and running. SHUPP sends weekend food backpacks with child-friendly selections home on Fridays with some 150 children in the Princeton schools and the Princeton Nursery School.

The first meal package went out at the end of September 2013. To date, some 22,000 meals have been distributed, estimated Ms. Neira and Mr. Wishnick. A second fundraiser last September, a formalized committee, and a new, more informative website are efforts to make the program more accessible. SHUPP is planning an expansion to include sixth-to-eighth graders next month when packages will be available for students at John Witherspoon Middle School.

SHUPP is a collaboration of the Princeton Human Services Commission, Mercer Street Friends in Trenton, and the Princeton School District. “When we started fundraising here and told people there is hunger in Princeton, some people would look at us and laugh,” Mr. Wishnick said. “Others were shocked. But there’s a huge disparity in income here. Twenty percent earn $30,000 or less, and 1,450 individuals in Princeton have poverty-level incomes. Half of them have incomes that are half the poverty level, which is $6,000. How can they live on that?”

Some individuals do seasonal work, which leaves them no income at all during some times of the year. Feeding their families can be a great struggle.

In order to avoid embarrassment, the program is anonymous. A point person in each school coordinates how the meals are given to each student. But Ms. Neira and Mr. Wishnick have been pleased to learn that there seems to be no discrimination against those receiving the assistance. “There just isn’t as much of a stigma as we expected,” Mr. Wishnick said. “At Johnson Park, people just accept it, we’re told,” Ms. Neira said. “Of course, they’re still young, they don’t have cliques yet. I hope it’s the same in the middle school.”

In the future, the SHUPP board hopes to address the problem of feeding children during the summer months, when school is closed. It is an ongoing challenge. While Princeton University, Princeton Theological Seminary, The Bonner Foundation, Councilwoman Jenny Crumiller, and others were early contributors to SHUPP, funding is always a concern. “The real challenge for us is to make it financially sustainable,” said Mr. Wishnick. “We know we’re meeting a need. What we don’t know is how we can continue to get the money to meet that need.”

“One thing we have seen across the board is that there is food insecurity here,” said Ms. Neira. “There are people not eating. Parents are not eating so that their kids can eat. The problem is real.”

“We’re on the right track, it seems,” Mr. Wishnick said. “But we can still improve it. There is always more we can do. There are probably some 800 to 900 kids in Princeton who are food insecure, and we need to reach them.”