By Tracy Ouellette
Editor
If the East Troy School District can’t get its lunchtime meal participation up and its costs down, the district-run food service program may be at risk. This was the warning nutrition consultant Susan Peterman gave the School Board at the May 11 meeting when she presented her report on the food service program.
Peterman was hired by the district to evaluate the food program, which has been losing money since the revised federal lunch guidelines for schools participating in the National School Lunch Program went into effect in the 2012-13 school year.
Finding a balance between meeting the new, healthier guidelines and serving food the kids will actually eat has been a struggle across the country. For districts like East Troy that still run their own food service program and/or have a high rate of free or reduced price lunches are at a particular disadvantage. They can’t afford to lose the federal funding that comes with the new guidelines.
For the 2013-14 school year, East Troy had a $92,000 deficit in its food service program. For this school year, District Business Manager Kathy Zwirgzdas was able to balance the budget by increasing the a la carte prices at East Troy High School, not filling an open food service staff position, ordering less expensive food, having more food prepared in house, and utilizing the 10 cent increase in lunch prices that took effect in spring.
But Zwirgzdas didn’t think that was going to solve the long-term problem with the hot lunch program, so the district contracted with Peterman to do a comprehensive study of its program and help identify ways to improve service and increase the number of kids in the lunch line.
What Peterman found wasn’t very reassuring.
While the average drop off in lunches served at state schools after the regulatory changes was somewhere between 8 and 10 percent in paid lunches for the 2013-14 school year, East Troy saw drop-off rate of 16.2 percent. These numbers do not include the free and reduced-priced meals, which have remained stable. In East Troy, 26 percent of the kids taking hot lunch are on the free or reduced price program.
Peterman told the board May 11 that the average hot lunch participation for elementary schools is about 70 percent of the student body. At Doubek Elementary, about 38 percent of the kids take hot lunch, and at Prairie View it’s about 57 percent. The hot lunch participation rate in the district as a whole is about 53 percent, Peterman said.
Peterman also said that the losses the district has experienced have all been in the paid lunches.
“Kids who have a choice are not participating,” she told the board.
“That is not sustainable with current expenditures,” Peterman said at the board meeting.
Peterman’s report outlined some measures the district had recently taken to stem the losses from the lunch program, such as eliminating foods that weren’t being eaten, adding new kid friendly choices, cutting the wait time in the lunch line at the High School and creating a four-week rotating menu to better allow the district to order food in a timely manner.
They have also added more “grab and go” items at the High School level, which kids prefer, Peterman said.
The changes have helped; expenditures are down to the 2011-12 school year level, according to Zwirgzdas.
“That’s good news,” she said. “But my revenues are still lacking. We still have to bring our food costs in line and our labor costs in line because we’re serving less kids.”
Another problem Peterman found was the food service staff not being in touch with the fact that the children taking hot lunch were in fact customers and the staff’s job was to make sure their customers were satisfied.
“They don’t have to support the program,” Peterman said. “We need to earn that.”
