By Emilee Wentland, editor-in-chief, The Spectator
When Ashley St. Aubin-Clark first set foot on the UW-Eau Claire campus, she had a bright vision for the years to come.
Going to college had been her plan since she was young and she knew the years ahead would help her develop her skills as a teacher. What St. Aubin-Clark didn’t expect of her college experience, though, was qualifying for food stamps and regularly visiting a food pantry during her fourth and fifth years in school.
St. Aubin-Clark is one of nearly four million college students nationwide without reliable access to nutritious food, also known as being “food insecure.” This figure is based on statistics from the National Center for Educational Statistics, a federal research entity focused on U.S. education.
Last year St. Aubin-Clark, a secondary education student at UW-EC, took an Americorps position at the Boys and Girls Club. Although the position was rewarding and beneficial to her future career as a teacher, it was technically a volunteer position and offered her only a living stipend rather than a wage. Because she wasn’t making any wages, she qualified for Wisconsin FoodShare assistance — formerly known as food stamps — which she said amounted to $129 a month.
“For one person, that was definitely meeting my needs,” St. Aubin-Clark said. “At the Boys and Girls Club, I was eating dinner with the kids every night through that program, so I was only having to cover breakfast, lunch and snacks.”
A study by the Wisconsin HOPE Lab — a UW-Madison college affordability research lab — found that anywhere from 20 to 22 percent of college students were food insecure and dealing with “disrupted eating patterns due to inability to access adequate food.”
Food insecure college students in Eau Claire have access to on-campus food pantries at UW-Eau Claire and Chippewa Valley Technical College.
Click here to read the entire article in The Spectator.
Click here to read an earlier story on UW-EC’s Campus Harvest Food Pantry, by former CVPost intern Rachel Helgeson. That food pantry is shown in the home page photo.
Emilee Wentland is a fourth-year journalism student and is completing her fourth semester on the staff of The Spectator. She can be reached at wentlaet7882@uwec.edu.
Note: the Chippewa Valley Post has arranged with The Spectator, UW-Eau Claire’s student newspaper, to publish the early paragraphs of various Spectator articles that may be of interest to the general community. A link to the full article will be provided whenever this is done.