Any child 18 or younger, regardless of where they go to school, can pick up free breakfast and lunch this summer through a new meal program launched by the Jim Thorpe Area School District.

As of Wednesday’s school board committee meeting, 206 families had enrolled and the district was preparing to distribute roughly 660 meals. Pickups begin Monday, June 15, and run through Aug. 6.

“This is for anybody,” Superintendent Robert Presley said. “They do not have to live inside the district, so we have people from Palmerton and Lehighton signed up for this. As long as they’re 18 or under.”

Presley said an uptick in registrations had come in just hours before Wednesday’s meeting after an afternoon announcement was sent out.

The program is built around a QR-code pickup system designed to satisfy federal auditors. The district created a Google form that generates a unique QR code for each registered family.

When a family arrives at a pickup site, staff scan the code, confirm the number of meals owed, hand them over and mark the family as served.

“It will tell us exactly how many meals each family is supposed to be given,” Presley said.

Meals are available at two sites. The Penn Kidder Campus holds pickup from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. The high school runs a later window from 2 to 3 p.m. Both days of distribution, Mondays and Thursdays, require families to have re-registered by the previous Wednesday.

“Every week you do have to sign up again, but then you will get a QR code,” Presley said. “You just move through the line.”

Families who cannot pick up their own meals can designate an alternate.

Both the account holder and the alternate receive a QR code, and the system allows only one of the two codes to be redeemed per distribution cycle.

Officials are encouraging word-of-mouth sign-ups to keep the weekly counts accurate. Because the district must prepare exactly as many meal packs as families plan to pick up, administrators need fresh registrations each week rather than a single enrollment at the start of summer.

“If people really hear about it and all of a sudden want to sign up, we have to make sure we keep signing up, because we have to know weekly how many we need to make,” Presley said. “We don’t want to make too much and we don’t want to make too little.”

The registration form is available on the district website, and confirmation emails with QR codes are sent automatically upon submission.

“I am really excited about this,” Presley said. “I hope it really takes off.”