Education

Keep up with Columbia public schools

Below the overview of the district are links to KBIA's coverage of Columbia 93 district schools, updated as more stories are published. Columbia 93 at a glanceThe Columbia 93 school district currently includes 32 different schools. In 2014, the district had a k-12 enrollment of 17,204 students, which is 2% of the total k-12 enrollment for the state. Enrollment has been slightly increasing in recent years, 2% since 2011. While a small percent, that amounts to almost 400 more students. There have also been major re-drawing of attendance areas with the addition of Battle High School. Middle school attendance areas shape high school boundaries 00000178-cc7d-da8b-a77d-ec7d2f9e0000The changes have affected all schools in the district, including causing high school attendance to increase and overcrowding at one middle school at least.

Kids' summer lunch program begins

KBIA | By Haoyang Zhang

Published June 10, 2013 at 7:21 AM CDT

The Columbia/Boone County Department of Public Health and Human Services will start a summer food program from Monday, June 10, at Douglass Park in Columbia.

This is the 13th year of providing nutritional summertime lunches in Columbia. Because the program is federally subsidized, the U.S. Department of Agriculture mandates that every meal contain a serving of milk, protein, grains, fruit and vegetables. Meals will be prepared by Columbia Public Schools and served by volunteers. There will be five volunteers serving pre-wrapped food and drink as cafeteria line.

In 2012, the program served an average of 100 children each day.

When talking about the amount of children the program expects to serve, Community Health Manager Mary Martin said, “We tend to start out fairly where we consider conservative and then we just get a feel for how many are coming. Some days are more and some days are less. Our counts always go up when summer school is over. So June will be a lighter month for us than July and August because the kids are in school.”

The summer food program will provide nutritional meals to children 18 years old or younger. Lunch will be served every weekday (except July 4) from 11:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. until August 9.