School lunch programs could be broke by fall
Losing millions feeding children in pandemic
The line of cars usually begins to form well before 11 a.m. outside Sharon Elementary school in Newburgh, Indiana, a town of fewer than 4,000 people along the Ohio River.
Stella Antey, an 8-year-old second grader, has sat in one of those cars with her older sister, younger brother and parents every weekday for the past two months. The wait for cafeteria workers to hand them free lunches and breakfasts for the next day has often been the highlight of their mornings since schools closed in March.
“My favorite is the breakfast,” she said. “I like the cereal and milk.”
Her mother, high school civics and dance teacher Amanda Antey, enjoys the break the trips give her children from the sometimes restrictive learnfrom-home routine.
Still, the free meals are far from a luxury. Antey and her drama teacher husband, Eric, still receive pay from Warrick County but can no longer teach the after-school dance and theater classes that provided extra income for their young family of five. Antey says that loss, along with rising food prices during the pandemic, makes the free school meals for their three children crucial.
“Nothing goes to waste,” Amanda Antey said. “Whatever the kids don’t eat, my husband and I eat it.”
Necessity – both to prevent students from going hungry and to keep the people feeding them safe – is what drives Shenae Rowe through the long days and weekends since she joined hundreds of school nutrition directors across the country who, in a matter of days, transformed their school meal operations into emergency feeding programs.
The efforts come at a price. In the past 10 weeks alone, school districts and nonprofit organizations tasked with feeding children during the pandemic have lost at least $1 billion. The losses continue to climb with every lunch and breakfast workers serve and could force programs across the county to go into debt or dip into money dedicated to teachers and classrooms to stay afloat. Challenges have come from all sides. Although nearly half of America’s schoolchildren were allowed free or reduced price lunches before the pandemic, school shutdowns eliminated the revenue that came from other children whose families paid for the meals.
At the same time, costs have soared. Protective equipment for employees, extra cleaning measures, steps to ensure social distancing in food prep, hazard pay in some cases – they all cost more. It’s also more expensive to package meals that can be taken home or to buy individually wrapped foods that are more portable and easier to serve from a social distance than the soups and family-style meals cafeteria workers used to ladle out a scoop at a time to long lines of children.
All told, spending for many feeding programs has outstripped federal reimbursements for the emergency meals. The House’s most recent relief bill allocated $3 billion for child nutrition programs from now through September 2021, but the bill will face heavy challenges in the Senate, and school food coordinators say they’re unclear on how much of that money will go to individual districts even if it passes.
Still in emergency mode, school nutrition directors like Rowe, whose program has lost $500,000 since March, say they’re too overwhelmed to even begin thinking about what they’ll do when schools reopen in the fall.
“Honestly, we haven’t been able to get past looking at today, day by day and week by week,” Rowe said. “We just keep going.”
Cash poor, cost rich
In Orlando, Florida, where nearly three-quarters of students at Orange County Public Schools qualified for free or reduced-price lunches, Laura Gilbert said her food service program brought in $2.2 million from paid lunches in March of last year.
This year, Gilbert estimates her program lost $4 million in March. That number grew to between $6 million and $8 million in April and probably the same for May.
Emergency meals have now all but wiped out the cash reserves Gilbert took years to build. Without any outside help, she said, there will be no money left by August.
Orange County schools averaged a million meals served to students every five days when they were open. The emergency program now serves between 115,000 and 117,000 meals a day, struggling to find prepackaged items like the cereal bars that were popular with students for breakfast before schools closed.
For years Gilbert had worked to keep product and labor costs down wherever she could while offering students meals like freshly baked pizzas, hummus from scratch and trendy dishes like Korean stir-fry tacos.
But even those innovations, she said, cost less to produce than the emergency meals the district serves from 52 locations on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, sending each student home with six meals every Friday.
“That’s our biggest challenge because it costs a lot more money to give out four or six meals at a time as opposed to having a kid come through the lunch line and get one breakfast or one lunch,” Gilbert said.
Julie Beer, food service coordinator for the Ukiah Unified School District in Mendocino County, California, said her team is already “grasping at straws to keep the kids fed.”
About 80% of the approximate 6,000 students in the district are low-income, a percentage so high that it qualifies all students for free meals.
The district is serving about 57,000 free meals a week, either at distribution points where families drive through to pick up items or by school bus delivery at drop-off points.
Ukiah’s food services team packs up totes with an entire week’s worth of prepared meals for students – with breakfast and lunch that’s 14 servings per order – and distributes them on Mondays.
Like Gilbert’s program in Orlando, it costs more per meal to give students several meals at a time than it would to serve meals individually through a lunch line. And the district is stretched because it can’t supplement the meals with anything it makes from scratch, such as soup and spaghetti, because it can’t guarantee those items would still be fresh and safe by the time children eat them.
According to a recent survey of nearly 2,000 school districts across the country, nearly half of school districts offering emergency meals serve them only once a week.
Rowe, in southern Indiana, is an exception. Like 13% of the schools that participated in the School Nutrition Association’s April 30 survey, workers at the Warrick County district serve meals to students five days a week.
Even in daily meal service, foods need to be packaged. Take apple slices, a food that has been a staple in American school breakfast and lunches for decades.
Without the ability to place a few apple slices on a child’s plate inside a lunch room, Rowe was left with two options: pay more for individually wrapped packages of apple slices, or package them in-house.
Rowe decided on the latter, but that alone was an undertaking that involved opening a separate kitchen to allocate two food prep workers whose full-time job it is to slice apples, kiwis, celery sticks and other fruits and vegetables for the meals the Antey family and others depend on.
While a cumbersome undertaking in Indiana, where Rowe’s team serves 1,000 meals daily, such an effort would require 100 times the effort in Orlando. So school districts that size opt for the prepackaged options when they can.