Covering Coronavirus: Athens, Ohio

FRONTLINE: Film Audio Track | PBS

FRONTLINE

Pbs, Tv & Film, Wgbh, Documentaries, Frontline

4.8 • 2.3K Ratings

🗓️ 10 April 2020

⏱️ 17 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

As schools close to help stem the spread of COVID-19, what happens to kids who rely on school meals to eat? FRONTLINE producer Jezza Neumann reports from Athens, Ohio — where school buses are now delivering food to students in need. And, as Neumann discovered, some teachers are personally taking meals to those in areas too remote for buses to reach. “Everybody just wants these kids to be fed,” Neumann says. But he’s finding that with each passing week, the coronavirus heightens food scarcity — and the children he speaks with are acutely aware of the risk of hunger that lies before them.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I really enjoy doing this. I enjoy being here at work. I enjoy feeling like I am. I'm
0:10.7	helping people through this coronavirus. People are hungry. People have to be fed. It's
0:17.1	a necessity.
0:18.7	This is the frontline dispatch. I'm Rainy Arons and executive producer of frontline.
0:24.1	Covering coronavirus is a special series of conversations with our journalists in the
0:28.0	field. They're reporting on this pandemic and how it's affecting lives across the world
0:33.7	moment to moment.
0:35.3	There's so many people that are now falling into this world who for the first time will
0:39.8	it be experiencing this food insecurity as they've lost their jobs and as cities shut
0:44.6	down.
0:45.6	That's reporter and filmmaker Jeza Newman. He had been working on a documentary for us
0:50.1	about the lives of poor children in battleground states leading up to the presidential election.
0:55.9	But when the coronavirus hit, the story took a dramatic turn.
1:02.6	The frontline dispatch is made possible by the Abrams Foundation, committed to excellence
1:06.9	in journalism and by the WGBH Catalyst Fund.
1:12.0	Jeza, hey tell me where you are right now.
1:14.6	Hi Rainy. I'm in Athens, Ohio at the moment.
1:17.9	So Athens County, I know it's quite rural. Help us see. What does it look like there?
1:24.6	It's beautiful. It's absolutely stunning.
1:28.2	You know, it's that strange juxtaposition of the beauty of the area set against the
1:34.8	potential devastation but also the issues that people are already facing.
1:39.1	This is a really poor area. I've never witnessed an area with these levels of poverty.
	...

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