District limiting shelf life of food for cafeterias

Board approves policy on 5-4 vote

After several months of discussion, Gateway school board on Tuesday approved a new policy to limit the shelf life of all foods in the school cafeterias to three years.

The former policy, which followed U. S. Department of Agriculture guidelines, allowed frozen foods to be kept indefinitely.

The issue surfaced in the fall, when school board member Valerie Warning said she discovered meats and cheeses in the high school kitchen that dated to 2012.

On Tuesday, Ms. Warning was one of four board members to vote against the new three-year limit. Before the vote, she said she was in favor of the three-year limit until last week.

She said she and three other board members were in the high school last Friday.

“We just decided to take a walk through the refrigerators and freezers and came [upon] some food that was sitting there since 2014 again,” she said

“I can’t go with ‘this was an oversight’ or ‘ we missed it,’ ” she said, adding that there was an “awful lot of food [that had] been sitting there for years,” including frozen turkeys from 2015.

Ms. Warning said she wanted the matter to be discussed further at an upcoming policy meeting.

Board member Chad Stubenbort responded that if the new policy wasn’t approved, the old policy of allowing frozen food to be kept indefinitely would remain in effect.

Food service director Martin Lorenzo said last month that he was “more than comfortable” with the new three-year policy.

The board vote to approve the three-limit was 5-4, with Mr. Stubenbort, Neal Nola, John Ritter, Scott Williams and Mary Beth Cirucci in favor.

In addition to Ms. Warning, George Lapcevich, Steve O’Donnell and Stephanie Byrne dissented.

In other business, the board voted unanimously to lease new technology equipment for 2017-18, including 370 MacBook Pro computers for students and teachers at a cost of $126,451 per year for four years and 700 iPads at a cost of $93,023 per year for three years.

Each lease has an option for the district to buy the equipment at the end of the lease terms.

The board also approved warranties for the equipment in the amount of $81,000 for the computers and $34,300 for the iPads.