New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
School meals program faces up to $4M deficit
NEW HAVEN — The city’s school meals program promises students free, nutritionally balanced meals. The program’s finances, however, are out of whack.
Michael Gormany, the city’s budget director, said the district is facing upward of a projected $4 million deficit in its school meals program by the end of the fiscal year, at the current rate.
“This has been a tough first half of the year for food services,” Gormany said.
The program, which offers free breakfast, lunch
and dinner to students under the age of 18 in the city five days per week, receives about 90 percent of its revenue from federal reimbursements from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. To remain solvent, the program must serve about 10,000 meals daily in a school system that has about 20,000 students. However, with students learning remotely, school officials are struggling to put those meals into the hands of students.
Gormany told the Board of Education’s finance committee that recent efforts to expand the program — such as adding dinners and a pre-ordering program — have only brought the program to about 3,000 meals served per day.
The financial losses to the meals program, which so far has kept its staff levels consistent throughout the pandemic, are an incentive to return students to school, district leaders said.
The city’s school buildings have been closed since March 2020 — including the entirety of the current academic year to date — after a Board of Education vote over concerns regarding the district’s pandemic preparedness. When the school board was due to reevaluate whether schools should open in early November, an increase in coronavirus cases in the city led to an intervention from the health department to keep schools closed indefinitely.
On New Year’s Eve, Superintendent of Schools Iline Tracey informed families that there would be an effort to reopen schools to students pre-K through fifth grade by Jan. 19.
Two members of the Board of Education who voted against reopening schools in August told the Register they were not consulted about the announcement of Jan. 19 as a target date to reopen schools.
“We’re encouraged by the fact we have students potentially coming back now on Jan. 19,” District Chief Financial Officer Phil Penn said.
“It gives us a lot more opportunities to serve meals,” he said.
Penn said the proposed hybrid model, which would see students of families who agree to in-person learning put into groups for alternating days of in-person instruction, also could mean students take home meals for days when they are not in school — further expanding the number of reimbursable meals served.
“We’re still not getting close to the numbers we need to be sustainable at this point. I’m somewhat optimistic that by having the younger grades come into the classroom in the coming weeks we can start to tackle the problem pretty aggressively,” Penn said.
Committee member Larry Conaway said he had concerns about the heavy reliance on reopening schools in two weeks as a means of solving the food program’s money issues. He asked whether the district could pursue community partnerships as a means of distributing more meals. Penn said the district has considered measures such as distributing to food banks, but federal restrictions require that the district log who picks up a meal for it to be reimbursable.
Assistant Superintendent Ivelise Velazquez, who has assumed the operational management of the food service program as the district looks to fill the vacant chief operating officer position, also said many families she has spoken to do not realize they do not have to have a need for free lunch to qualify. Even if a family has food in the home for students learning remotely, they still are eligible to pick up school meals for free — which adds revenue to the program at no cost to families or the district.
Tracey said she has learned from discussions with the state Department of Education that the problem of maintaining a food service program reliant on federal reimbursement for revenue during a time without regular school lunch periods is being experienced around the state.
“This is not just New Haven. It’s around Connecticut,” she said.