Wake schools votes to raise school lunch prices again

The Wake County school board will raise school lunch prices by a quarter next year, in response to growing costs of running the school meal programs.

The Wake County Board of Education approved the request from the Wake County Public School System during the board’s regular meeting Tuesday night on a 5-4 vote.

Board members Sam Hershey, Wing Ng, Lynn Edmonds, Chris Heagarty and Lindsay Mahaffey voted for the increase. Board members Tara Waters, Monika Johnson-Hostler, Tyler Swanson and Cheryl Caulfield voted against the increase.

Those who voted against the increase said they wanted the school system to explore more options for covering nutrition department deficits before proposing a price increase, noting the cost to families.

“If we really want to say we are fully supporting our students we have to put our dollar where our mouth is,” Swanson said. Students who are hungry aren’t ready to learn, he said.

Caulfield noted the parents who work multiple jobs already and struggle financially.

“I feel like it’s the little guy that keeps getting the brunt of it,” Caulfield said.

Ng said the vote came down to making a hard choice to prioritize efforts to increase wages for child nutrition service workers, where vacancies are high. He recalled a meeting earlier this spring in which workers said they were stretched too thin with the vacancies.

“It was heart-wrenching to hear their stories, and I can’t it out of my head,” Ng said. “So what do we do about it? We have to do something.”

System officials presented the proposal for the first time during the board’s work session beforehand, noting myriad financial challenges.

The Wake County school system projects a $6.7 million revenue shortfall next year. To cover it, the school system can use $3.1 million in federal carryover funds and some additional cash, but it will need to raise the price of school lunches by $0.25, from $3 to $3.25 for elementary schools and from $3.25 to $3.50 for middle and high schools, to cover the rest of the deficit. It would not raise breakfast prices.

The school system has already cut about 70 full-time equivalent positions from the Child Nutrition Services department, said Paula DeLuca, the department’s senior director. The positions were vacant.

The school board raised prices for all meals last year by $0.25.

A $0.25 per meal price increase would cost a family $44.25 more per child for a 177-day school year.

The district expects the price increase to raise just less than $1 million for the nutrition department.

The Wake school board isn’t the only one considering a price increase. The Chatham County school board approved a $0.50 increase per lunch, while making breakfast free to all students, last week. The Orange County school board is weighing a $0.30 per lunch and $0.35 per breakfast, except at elementary schools where breakfasts would remain free.

“The higher cost of school meals combined with the loss of those pandemic-era benefits and rising inflation have been real hard challenges for families across North Carolina, and those problems are not going away,” said Tamara Baker, project’s and communications director for the Carolina Hunger Initiative housed at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “Schools have the reality of considerable meal debt.”

Wage increases and supply chain inconsistencies are affecting all school systems, said Ruth McDowell, president of the School Nutrition Association of North Carolina. McDowell is also the child nutrition director at Edgecombe County Public Schools.

A substitute breakfast item from a vendor Monday ended up costing the district $5 more per case, McDowell said. Raises from about $11 per hour to $15 per hour had to be funded by the nutrition department, rather than state or local funds. That leaves less money left over for equipment and supplies.

“I do believe our people deserve it, I do, I do, I do,” McDowell said. “But it would be nice to get some help for that so it wouldn’t cost us so much money from our budget.”

Wake’s proposed price increase would push its meal price above Johnston County Schools’ but still below Chatham County Schools and Durham Public Schools. Its prices would still be higher than some other major schools systems in other North Carolina regions, including Guilford County Schools, Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools and Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools.

What’s causing higher costs

By law, school nutrition programs operate as self-sustaining programs, so they must pay for all wages and expenses with earned revenues, such as paid or reimbursed meals. They’re essentially like non-profit restaurants, operating independently within the public education system. They’re funded based on the meals they sell, not by a line item in a school system budget.

The Wake County school system is expecting a shortfall because of proposed wage increases, the end of some federal assistance, and the rising costs of food, packaging, and services.

Wage increases must be funded by meal revenue, as they do not come with state or local funding.

DeLuca said some items cost 25% more than they used to and some cost 300% more than they used to.

The school system had received $6 million in federal assistance with supply chain issues, and it had also received higher federal meal reimbursements. The federal government reimburses school systems for each meal served to a student who qualifies for free or reduced-price lunch, and that reimbursement rate is now mostly returning to its pre-COVID-19 pandemic rate. The rate change alone will be a $3.8 million hit to the nutrition program.

The district also has a small shortfall because of paid school meal debt, though its debt is much smaller than other large school systems in North Carolina. According to a survey in January by the state Department of Public Instruction, some district families had a collective meal debt of nearly $22,000, a small fraction of the $2.9 million in school meal debt tallied at the time. Debt reached about $327,000 in Union County Schools, $261,000 in Durham Public Schools, $225,000 in Charlotte-Mecklenberg Schools, $157,000 in Johnston County Schools, $122,000 in Buncombe County Schools and $117,000 in Guilford County Schools.

School meal debt grew to $3.4 million by March for all public schools, according to DPI.

Paying for meals again

This is the first year since the 2019-20 school year in which families were charged for school meals. Congress made the meals free for two years after the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

North Carolina lawmakers have covered the cost of reduced-price meals for families who qualify the discounted, but not free, meals during this school year. Budgets proposed for the next two years also include covering that cost.

Some relief for families and school systems could come from expanded eligibility for schools to quality for the Community Eligibility Provision. That program allows schools with a certain percentage of lower-income families to qualify for free meals for all students, applying every four years for the benefit. Students on Medicaid will for the first time next year qualify toward that lower-income classification, potentially allowing more schools to qualify.

Mark Strickland, the Wake County Public School System’s chief of facilities and operations, said the district is working on adding more schools to the program.

That’s one good things McDowell said she’s hearing from other school systems.

“But our costs are still going to go up,” McDowell said. “That’s not going to help with the cost increases of food items we have to purchase.”

The Carolina Hunger Initiative is one of a handful of groups advocating for free meals for all, as a part of the School Meals for All North Carolina group.

Baker said about a third of students who qualify for free or reduced-price meals don’t apply for them. Meanwhile, one in six North Carolina children isn’t getting enough to eat.

“School meals are the healthiest meals that children typically get and in many cases is the only meal that they receive,” Baker said. “And so how do you expect a child to be able to learn? And how do you expect them to be able to behave?”

Children visit the school nurse for stomachaches and headaches when they aren’t eating enough nutritious food, Baker said.

McDowell knows the food at school isn’t enough to make up for the lack of food at home. Recently, one students asked her if he could have another lunch at school, because he was still hungry. He couldn’t get a second free lunch, by rule, so he had to ask another student who ate a homemade meal that day to go through the line and grab a second lunch for him. The other student was only able to do that because the school participates in the Community Eligibility Provision and the lunch would be free.