Beads of sweat trailed down Frederico Reyna’s temples to the brown bandana tied around his neck as he heaved icy 10-pound bags of chicken from a freezer case. “Pollo?” he asked each time someone rolled a brimming grocery cart by. “The Chicken Man,” as Reyna is known, leaned on this West Dallas food pantry to feed his grandkids just months ago, but now he’s one of the cogs that keep it running. It’s toilsome, repetitive work that angers the 67-year-old’s sciatic nerve, but children are hungry.
The Dallas Independent School District Resource Center, where Reyna works part time, has become a crucial Band-Aid to the vast and knotted problem of child hunger. Two days a month, hundreds of caretakers of Dallas ISD students line up outside its doors to get food they increasingly cannot afford. Recently, their numbers have ballooned.
As the cost of living continues to rise around the country, food insecurity in North Texas is rising with it. The region has the fourth-highest number of people facing hunger in the nation, according to recent data from the North Texas Food Bank and the Tarrant Area Food Bank. The problem is especially acute among children. One in 4 kids in North Texas are now food insecure, meaning they have limited or uncertain access to food.
On a recent Thursday, Reyna stood in his regular spot in front of the freezer cases of the food pantry that opened last year in the former Dr. L. G. Pinkston Senior High School. Forty-two years ago, he cleaned floors and took out trash there as a custodian. He retired from the district in 2023, but the needs of his family, and thousands others, drew him back to the workforce.
Reyna is one of a handful of staffers who run the food pantry where, two Thursdays a month, people in need can select their own items just like a traditional grocery store. It’s operated in partnership with faith-based nonprofit Brother Bill’s Helping Hand, which supplies the food. The pantry used to receive about 120 visitors during its two daily operating windows, but in recent months that number has nearly doubled. It’s common now for Reyna to give away close to 500 pounds of frozen chicken a shift.
Regardless of how small it may seem in the shadow of the beast, Reyna is proud of the part he plays. He can’t drive down the cost of eggs or gas, but he can hand out free food and smile while doing it. That, he believes, makes a difference.
“This bag,” he said, tapping one of the mounds of frozen chicken quarters, “is going to feed a family. You have to start somewhere, somehow.”
The idea for school district food pantries stemmed from that notion of starting somewhere, somehow. Too often, students in Dallas schools were showing up to class hungry, so when the $3.5 billion Dallas ISD bond package passed in 2020, the district allocated money to open resource centers outfitted with food pantries.
“We educate kids,” said Liliana Valadez, Dallas ISD’s director of resource centers, “however, we cannot do that unless we have the kids’ survival needs met.”
Valadez, who spent decades working for the school district, came out of retirement to oversee the creation of the resource centers in parts of the city that had been redlined. Resource Center South opened near Fair Park in 2022, and Resource Center West, where Reyna works, opened in 2025. Two more centers are in development; one at John Lewis Social Justice Academy in southern Dallas and another at H. Grady Spruce High School in Pleasant Grove.
The centers provide Dallas ISD families a battery of resources like English classes, workout classes, counseling, afterschool care, summer camps, and laundry rooms. The grocery store — open to families who have a child enrolled in the district and meet monthly household income thresholds — has become one of their most sought-out services. All families leave with about 150 pounds of food, which would cost roughly $300 if purchased from a grocer.
“The numbers are just growing,” Valadez said. “We’re registering new families every day.”
Keeping up with the demand for the grocery store is a challenge that increasingly requires volunteer help, said Valadez, who often jumps in to bag groceries. Preserving the dignity of those in need requires having enough hands to keep shelves stocked, carts returned, and groceries bagged.
The growing food insecurity seen by Dallas ISD is happening across the state as Texas families struggle under rising costs, said North Texas Food Bank CEO Trisha Cunningham. The “most disturbing” datapoint is the number of kids experiencing hunger, she said.
“We’ve seen families watering their milk down so that it will last a bit longer,” Cunningham said, “and parents trying to make sure their child has nutrition and skipping meals themselves in order to be able to do that.”
Complicating the picture of food insecurity are recent changes to the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). The One Big Beautiful Bill Act restructured the program’s funding model to cut federal contributions in half. As of Oct. 1, states are required to cover 75% of the cost instead of 50%. Texas, the most food insecure state in the nation, must now spend an additional $117 million per year on the program, according to the Texas Department of Health and Human Services.
Other criteria changes, like no more work exemptions for veterans and kids who’ve aged out of foster care, have already reduced the number of people eligible for the program, Cunningham said. SNAP enrollment in Texas has decreased by 16% since last year. About 54% of the people in North Texas who are food insecure now make too much money to qualify for SNAP. Initiatives like the resource centers are left to try to fill this emerging gap.
“It’s very concerning,” Cunningham said. “That’s impacting the kids in our community. They’re not getting the support they used to get.”
What’s currently playing out at Dallas ISD’s food pantries, Cunningham said, is happening across the state: People who have never before had to rely on charitable food sources are showing up for help.
As the line at the West Dallas food pantry thinned and staff started preparing for the Thursday afternoon crowd, Ausencia Gomez loaded a cart with food for her family of five. She’s visited the little grocery store weekly since it opened because it’s more accommodating, and more comforting, than sitting in a line of cars outside a food bank and being handed a mystery box.
Gomez browsed as she would at any other grocery store. She grabbed peanut butter, applesauce, canned vegetables, eggs, cheese, dried beans, spaghetti, cabbage, carrots, and grapes. When she rounded an aisle to the freezer cases, a familiar face was waiting.
“I’ll tell you what, this chicken can be dressed up however you want it,” said The Chicken Man, lifting a bag into her cart. “Caldo de pollo, oooo-eeee!”
Gomez, smiling, thanked him and continued on. Reyna wiped his brow and waited for the next cart to roll by.
Claire Ballor is a staff writer for The Lab Report. Find more information about Dallas ISD’s food pantries here.