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Brendan Arnold dug into a lunch that would satisfy any 6-year-old: A tuna croissant sandwich, carrot sticks, a banana, fruit cocktail, potato chips and chocolate milk.

The croissant might have been the most unusual thing about Brendan’s meal if it weren’t for the fact that he and his 4-year-old brother Zakary weren’t eating on a bus painted to look like a watermelon parked at Kemp Auto in Harbor, Oregon. Their great grandmother, Linda Hadley, said the Bites of Brookings program has been great for her and the two boys.

“We’ve been here every day since day 1,” she said Thursday.

A new component of Brookings-Harbor School District’s 2019 Summer Food Program, Bites of Brookings, or the BOB Bus, is a school bus that’s been turned into a dining car. A buffet displays that day’s fare. Families can dine at a long table on one side of the bus facing the windows or there is booth-like seats that fit four. The BOB Bus can sit about 28 people, said Cindy Badger, the district’s food service director.

With Ron Webb in the driver’s seat and supervisor, LaDina Cobarrubia, ensuring each youngster has enough to eat, the bus began making stops at four locations in the Brookings-Harbor area on July 8. It will serve lunch on weekdays through Aug. 2, according to district spokeswoman Nancy Raskauskas-Coons.

Stops include the Harbor Rural Fire Protection District; RE/MAX Coast & Country; Kemp Auto Sales’ south entrance; and the Chetco Community Public Library.

“It being a pilot year, it’s more about the right formulation — where to have the stops,” said Raskauskas-Coons, who brought her youngsters Billy and Sally to the Kemp Auto stop for lunch. “One of the strategies is to prevent kids from crossing busy 101 in Harbor here. We’ve got stops on both sides of 101 in Harbor.”

Staff also looked at the district’s school bus routes to determine the neighborhoods with the highest concentration of students when it came to figuring out where the BOB bus should stop, Raskauskas-Coons said

So far, the library appears to be one of the more popular stops, Badger said.

“Yesterday at the library our bus was full,” she said.

Though the BOB Bus will serve lunch through Aug. 2, the Brookings-Harbor Summer Food Program will continue through Aug. 22 in the Brookings-Harbor High School cafeteria, according to the district’s website.

The program serves free healthy meals to kids age 18 and younger. Parents and family members can receive breakfast for $2.75 and lunch for $3.75. Daily fare includes fresh veggies from the garden at Brookings-Harbor High School. On the BOB bus Thursday, Billy and his mom enjoyed salad with school-grown lettuce.

According to Badger, the district was able to retrofit the bus with kid-sized furniture with a $20,000 After School Extended Summer Foods Grant from the Oregon Department of Education. The grant’s object was to encourage more youngsters to get meals. In-kind community support also got the bus rolling, Badger said.

Kindergartners came up with the idea of turning the bus into a watermelon, a concept supported by the district’s eighth-grade and senior classes, Raskauskas-Coons said.

Though other districts have retrofitted a school bus into a mobile meal program for their students, Badger said the BOB Bus stands out.

“A majority of the buses around the state that are running, usually the kids will sit outside,” she said. “I haven’t heard anywhere yet in Oregon that’s had a dine-in bus yet.”

The BOB Bus is at the Harbor Rural Fire Protection District from 11:30 to 11:45 a.m.; RE/MAX Coast & Country from 11:50 a.m. to 12:05 p.m.; Kempt Auto Sales from 12:10 p.m. to 12:40 p.m.; and the library from 12:45 p.m. to 1 p.m.
For more information, visit www.brookings.k12.or.us/.

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