Summer is a hard time for Amanda Willis. She looks after six kids, and when school's out, that job gets a lot more expensive without free school meals and with cooling costs rising.

"It is stressful because food costs $800 a month," Willis said.

The 33-year-old mother and her family are among a growing number of Montgomery County residents who struggle to put food on the table and pay the bills. Though many are familiar with the county's growth, thanks to the wealth of The Woodlands and the coming Exxon corporate campus just down Interstate 45, fewer see the poverty and hunger dispersed across the suburban and rural communities.

School officials see it. Over the past decade, every district in the county has seen an increase in the percentage of students designated "economically disadvantaged," according to the Texas Education Agency.

Last month, meanwhile, the Montgomery County Food Bank opened a new center, boosting its capacity from 220,000 pounds of food to 42 million pounds. The large increase was necessary to meet a rising need from the community that's being driven in large part by an influx of low-paying service jobs that coincide with the boom, said Rodney Dickerson, the food bank's president.

In 2013, the food bank served 25,000 to 30,000 individuals per month. This year, the number rose to 40,000 to 45,000 per month.

"The challenge is that people in Montgomery County don't really see the poverty because they're pockets that are hidden," said Julie Martineau, president of the Montgomery County United Way. "Because everything looks beautiful, and the people in poverty are away from the main roads, (many people) don't know it's here."

Some parts of the county, such as New Caney and Splendora, have long struggled with poverty.

Willis and her brother, Johnny Charles Willis Jr., 44, have lived in Splendora since childhood. Everyone knows them, she said, because "we're the only albinos in Splendora."

Between the two of them and their brother-in-law, they're raising six children, ages 8 to 14, on fixed incomes. Summer means feeding that many more mouths.

But for a few weeks, she gets help. Her brother-in-law just got switched to the night shift on his job threading pipe, so he drives Willis, who is disabled, and the kids to a one-room storefront in Patton Village. The town center lies just east of I-69, across a set of railroad tracks.

Help ends, heat doesn't

That's where Heaven's Army of Resources recently opened its newest location. Off a worn two-way street, the Christian nonprofit hosts Bible study, karate classes and other activities, sharing a parking lot with the trailers that house the city's police department and mayor's office.

For the past few weeks, Willis has been bringing her kids to take advantage of the lunch program. They can get free meals, supplied by the Splendora Independent School District, and she can get hers for just $3.

Today, the menu is tacos, served on whole-wheat tortillas. Other days it might be chicken, mashed potatoes and a roll, or maybe corn dogs and carrots. "I like the food," she said, "It's pretty good."

"Who wants chocolate milk?" calls out a volunteer, as kids swarm the refrigerator.

"My children love coming," Willis says.

Area school districts offer summer feeding programs. But they generally run through early July. That's the case for Splendora, where the program ended Wednesday.

"You come to dread the end," Willis said before the program concluded. "It's going to be hard, because there's still another month of summer."

Even with the school's breakfast and lunch programs in the first half of the summer, Dickerson said, the summer months are a difficult time for many.

"For us, we see it immediately," said the food bank president. "We see the jump as soon as school is out."

It's the combination of rising electrical costs to cool homes and the gaps in meals for school-age children that hurt the most in summer, he said.

Part of national trend

The food bank operates four mobile pantries once a month throughout the county, in addition to supplying food to various daily programs and hosting periodic "food fairs." Since the mobile pantry service began three years ago, Dickerson said, there's been a steady increase in demand.

Growing suburban poverty is part of a national trend, according to the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program. So while the country added some 12 million new poor people from 2005 to 2009, that growth tended to occur outside city limits.

"The growth we saw in poverty was located more frequently in the suburbs than in the cities," said Carey Anne Nadeau, a research analyst who worked with the Brookings program and is now a masters student at MIT's urban studies and city planning department. Houston ranked in the top 10 metropolitan areas where suburban poverty grew most rapidly in the 2000s, along with Dallas, Phoenix and Atlanta.

That decade also saw more concentrated poverty, or neighborhoods where more than 40 percent of residents live in poverty. In the suburbs, that sort of isolated poverty can be harder for families to combat, said Nadeau, because it tends to come with fewer affordable housing options and a lack of access to public services like mass transit.

Even suburbs that seem to be booming, like Montgomery County, experience the suburbanization of poverty, she said.

"It's a trend regional economists talk about all the time, where higher-wage employment can create low-wage employment," Nadeau said.

Three major groups contribute to hunger in Montgomery County, according to Dickerson: the working poor, children and seniors.

"When you experience the growth that Montgomery County has, in The Woodlands in particular, that brings the need for additional minimum wage workers," Dickerson said.

From 2002 to 2012, the number of low-wage workers in the county has increased from just below 150,000 to nearly 250,000, according to the local United Way. So while The Woodlands has a poverty rate of roughly 5 percent, according to census data, Patton Village's rate is more than five times that, standing at 26.3 percent.

Some of those filling low-income jobs are immigrants new to the area. But poverty affects a wide range of people in the county.

Interrelated issues

Nearly half of those seeking some form of food assistance in Montgomery County are white, according to figures provided by the county food bank. Thirty-eight percent are Hispanic and 10 percent are black. Children comprise 40 percent of the total number of people facing food insecurity.

Martineau, the United Way president, said issues such as poverty, hunger, graduation rates and health outcomes are all related, which is part of what makes addressing hunger such a complicated task. Programs that help make up for household budget shortfalls with free or reduced meals are necessary, Martineau said, but even more needs to be done.

"Children by themselves can't get out of poverty," she said. "Poverty is a long-term proposition."

With all the wealth coming to the area, she hopes there will be more opportunities for programs that help build financial independence for families.

"The key," Martineau emphasized, "is that people need to survive before they can thrive."