‘FREE’ LUNCHES COME AT A COST
Budget impact: School nutrition services running at deficit Pandemic milestone: District has given out 100,000 meals
Two months after the start of the North Penn School District’s free meal giveaways after the onset of the coronavirus crisis, the costs and scale of that program are coming into focus.
So far, more than 100,000 free meals have been given out to families in need, but changes may be coming for the summer and the next school year whenever it starts.
“We’ve just really had so much support through all of this from the district, and it’s been a great team effort to help feed our kids,” said district Coordinator of School Nutrition Services Melissa Froehlich.
“The reason why we’re all here is for the kids. And the families’ response to our free meal programming has been so appreciative — we love that we get the opportunity to continue to serve our students during the closure,” she said.
Starting on March 17, district SNS staff have made meals at a central district kitchen and handed out hundreds each day at five district elementary schools, on five days each week at first and then in late March switching to twice weekly to minimize trips and possible exposure. Since learning in mid-April that students would not return to school to finish the 2019-20 school year, staff have continued to streamline that process, Froehlich told the school board’s finance committee May 12, handing out over 94,000 meals as of that night and crossing the milestone of 100,000 total meals May 15.
“We are still planning on continuing our program, no matter what, throughout the summer. It would just depend on, Mondays and Thursdays, or changing it to daily service, where they would come out each day,” Froehlich said.
“As hard as it is to believe, we did have more than half of a school year prior to our emergency closure.”
The free meal program currently gives out three meals to any child on Mondays and four more on Thursdays, and is based on a federal program the district had already used to do similar meal distribution over the summer. On average of about 1,200 meals are made and given out on each of those days, with about 40 nutrition employees working on each day, with staff keeping proper social distancing at each site and packaging all food.
The 40 working on those meal days are among the department’s 140 total employees, which served in 2018-19 a total of just shy of 298,000 breakfast meals and 972,000 lunch meals over that school year. The summer meal program in 2019 was hosted at 27 sites and served over 66,000 meals, Froehlich told the committee, but this year’s summer program may look different depending on what state and federal health guidelines change between now and then.
“Now that we have our April figures in place, we are really able to predict what the rest of the school year will look like, with the anticipation that we will be continuing our free meal feeding through June 30 of this year,” Froehlich said.
In 2018-19 the department’s budget totaled roughly $5.6 million and produced a roughly $312,000 surplus, of which $50,000 was transferred back to the district general fund and the rest to reserves, which carried a balance of about $1.3 million heading into 2019-20. In February, the department ran a net profit of just below $29,000, which put year-to-date revenues at roughly $156,000 to the positive, Froehlich told the committee — and then March arrived.
“Once March hit, and the closure happened, we had a loss in March of just over $144,000, which left us year-to-date profits of just $11,000,” she said. “We knew in April, that would look worse because we still had a few regular school days in March. Our total loss for April was $209,457, giving us a new year-todate loss of $197,924.”
Sales of student lunches and a la carte items typically make up about 43% of the department’s revenues, Froehlich told the committee, and with that number now near -zero, the department is projecting yearend revenues of about $4.4 million, expenses of $5.15 million and a net loss of roughly $736,000, which would leave the fund balance at about $649,000 heading into 2020-21.
“Thankfully, we do have a strong fund balance, but this will take over half of what we had saved,” Froehlich said.
So far, staff have applied for six different grants to help offset the costs of the ongoing meal programs and have heard that two totaling $12,000 have been awarded to North Penn. The most immediate item facing the department is whether the federal government will continue a waiver allowing the multiple meals per day to be distributed all summer, a waiver currently set to expire June 30.
“We still plan on serving all summer long at the five sites that we do have open, but it might look a little different, based on the waivers — if they take that waiver away through June 30, then we’ll have to go back to daily distribution,” Froehlich said.
District Director of Business Administration Steve Skrocki added that the sudden dive in revenues from the nutrition department could have an impact on the overall district budget: instead of a source of revenue for the general fund, it could now become an expense.
Before the shutdown, staff had noted another worrying trend, Froehlich told the board: student accounts with negative balances for payments to cover meals were at an all-time high, with a figure of $5,533 in 2017-18 up to $15,520 in 2018-19 and tracking at $31,639 for 2019-20 when the shutdown hit. Those families were contacted twice weekly about that negative balance during the school year, and those letters slowed once the shutdowns began but went out again in early May, Froehlich told the board.
“In the beginning of May, we did write a letter to families with balances over $50 to attempt to start to collect that money and draw down that negative balance,” she said.
Another round of letters will go out in June to those still unpaid, and several donations have been received throughout the year to help offset those costs, including one large one: roughly $6,000 was donated in December to clear the balances owed at North Wales Elementary, Pennbrook Middle School, and North Penn High School, Froehlich said.
A total of 94 students have unpaid balances of at least $100, while roughly 76 students have unpaid balances between $50 and $99.99; 183 students have unpaid balances of $15 to $49.99 and 585 have unpaid balances up to $14.99.
Staff are already planning several changes for 2020-21, assuming the school year starts on time, including increases in the department’s paper budget to better package food items, and more for plastic and Plexiglas partitions. Self-service food stations will be removed for now, Froehlich told the committee, and new contact-less payment systems that use bar codes on student IDs were tested at the kindergarten level and will likely be used throughout the district.
“We will be working on removing PIN pads and going to bar code scanners, for students to use their IDs like kindergartners did this year. There’ll be completely contactless checkout for students,” she said.
The 2020-21 budget also includes a 1% salary increase for all employees, but a delayed start to the school year could mean fewer than full staff are needed, Froehlich told the committee — and could require a later revision to the 2020-21 budget once it’s adopted in June, Skrocki added.
The budget also includes more for cleaning and sanitizing supplies, and the department does plan to join the TriState Purchasing Group which could help reduce food costs, Froehlich said.
North Penn’s school board next meets online at 7 p.m. Thursday; for more information visit www. NPenn.org.