Penn-Trafford counselor helps provide backpacks of food for kids in need

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Lauren Traill has been helping ensure kids don’t go hungry for the last seven years.

The elementary school counselor for Penn-Trafford School District supervises the district’s Backpacks to Go program. Participants regularly receive backpacks or boxes full of food to bring home to their families.

The backpacks are filled thanks to donations of cash and food from the community.

“It’s been incredible,” Traill said. “If it wasn’t for the community, this program wouldn’t exist.”

Traill attended Penn-Trafford schools as a child, and she’s been an avid volunteer since her youth. Ever since she was a child she knew she wanted a job where she could help others.

“I’ve just always loved to be around kids, I’ve always loved to help people,” she said.

After getting a bachelor’s degree in psychology and a master’s degree in counseling, it wasn’t long before she was back at her home district.

She’s been a counselor at Penn-Trafford since 2012. Teachers she’d had at Harrison Park Elementary School are now her colleagues.

The Westmoreland County Food Bank had a program providing backpacks full of food to school children, but it was canceled in 2012. Traill and others started looking for ways to make sure Penn-Trafford students continued to get the food they needed.

They eventually decided to start a backpack program of their own. It launched in 2014.

The food bank restarted its own backpack program the next year, but by that time Penn-Trafford’s Backpacks to Go was up and running.

Traill oversees the program with Penn-Trafford high school nurse Lisa Popovich.

Staff and student volunteers make regular trips to buy food and pack the boxes and backpacks, which are sent home with students.

“It really, truly is a team effort through the district,” Traill said.

There are more than 90 students who receive food through the program, she said.

The coronavirus pandemic has proven the community’s generosity, according to Traill.

“When covid hit it was really incredible, because donations, instead of going down, actually went up,” she said.

Traill said she hopes to see the program continue for a long time to come.

“I feel very blessed to be in this position, to be one of the people who started it, and I would like to see it continue,” she said.