A lot of families struggle to feed their children when they are home for holiday break. 

At Glen Elementary in Durham, many students rely on the two meals they get a day at school.

 One 5th-grade teacher is making sure her students don’t go hungry during the holidays.

Turquoise Lejeune Parker’s 5th-grade classroom has transformed into Santa’s workshop, but instead of toys, these kids are packing up boxes of food to take home over the holiday break.

“It makes me happy one of my teachers helping others and us helping them,” said 5th grader Naomy Torreblanca-Solis.” It brings joy to everybody.” 

“I don’t know if there are words,” said Parker. “I have literally cried like all morning and on the way to school this morning because it truly is an overwhelming feeling to be able to help people out.” 

Parker has been doing this since 2015, but this year she’s able to feed the entire school that’s 640 students. 

“This year, when we raised 7,000, I was like ‘we can definitely do 5th grade’ but then after all the food got here I was like ‘I think we can do the whole school’,” Parker said. 

Monday was the last day of school before the kids go on break for two weeks. 

“There’s a lot of food insecurity and making sure that kids are able to actually have something throughout that because they’re missing two meals for two weeks that’s just an incredibly large amount of time so to be able to do that and know they’ll be okay so a lot of the teachers here are gonna sleep a lot better knowing that their kids are gonna be okay,” Parker said. 

While CBS 17’s Kelly Kennedy was interviewing Parker, her students started to cry.

“Why are y’all crying, stop it?” Parker asked her students.

“It’s so emotional,” replied one student.

“They’re just a huge part of me,” said Parker. “We spend a lot of time together and I really love them and it gets really hard in here. It’s not always beautiful because sometimes we have to have real conversations but they know that I love them with everything inside of me.”

Parker says this Christmas she wants to challenge everyone to be better.