Thursday morning, Florence City Schools unveiled the "Falcon Feeder." It's a state-of-the-art brand new food truck that will serve students and the community.

"How do we serve the community and students as whole?" said Florence City Schools Superintendent Dr. Jimmy Shaw.

Shaw said the Falcon Feeder is the answer to that question. The idea was born from the pandemic as schools shut down and the district saw just how many kids still needed food and some couldn't get to the to-go meals the district had.

"What we noticed was that even though we set up locations across Florence to make it easily accessible, there were simply many kids that didn't have a way to get to us and we didn't have any way to get to them. While the pandemic brought this to light, food insecurity is a problem year-round," said Florence City Schools Nutritionist, Tara Talmage.

Talmage said now they can pack meals up and have them delivered to students so no one will go hungry in any situation.

"This is a total game changer in the event of a school closure again. Hopefully, we don't have too many of those in our future, but we know aside from pandemic situations, there's natural disasters and certain things that will come up that will occasionally close schools. This will give us an immediate access plan to get food to those that really need it," said Talmage.

Talmage said they're finalizing routes and plans on how the delivery will work.

"We're working on building delivery routes that will be somewhat similar to bus routes that we currently operate. We will have drop locations, set times and certain places where families know to bring their children or within walking distance of some neighborhoods, for kids to come pick up breakfast and lunch from us," said Talmage.

The nonprofit, No Kid Hungry, donated $100,000 to the school system so they could get their Falcon Feeder.

Talmage is the one who applied for the grant. She said she thought it was a long shot but they decided to go for it and it paid off.