WASHINGTON — How much does it cost to serve kids healthy school meals?
The School Nutrition Association should know. SNA is an organization of 55,000 school food professionals, including both those who run school meal programs and those who supply the products they serve. Some of their members are complaining that they can’t run their cafeterias in the black. That’s why SNA is asking Congress for an extra 35 cents per meal for school breakfast and lunch, to bring government funding for school meals closer to their cost.
New higher food standards that are part of the 2010 Healthy Hunger Free Kids Act, combined with rising costs for food and labor, are putting increased pressure on school meal programs, which are required by law to break even. When a school meal program runs a deficit, the school district must transfer in money from the general fund to balance the books.
But is an extra 35 cents per meal really enough for school cafeterias to break even? Would it be enough to bail out the perennially insolvent SFUSD school meal program?
San Francisco Unified School District’s Student Nutrition Services has been running in the red for so long that memories of a balanced budget for that department are lost in the mists of antiquity. The city’s famously high cost of living drives everything higher, from wages (SF cafeteria workers start at over $14 hour while some other cities pay less than $10) to delivery costs (diesel currently costs about $2.75 per gallon in Lincoln, Nebraska, but about $3.50 a gallon in SF.)
Combine this with the SF Board of Education’s vote to offer healthy but pricey Revolution Foods meals to all students, and these higher costs pretty much doom SFUSD’s cafeterias to constant debt. In recent years, that debt has hovered between $2-3 million annually.
Let’s do a quick calculation to see if the School Nutrition Association’s ask of 35 cents per meal would be enough to get SFUSD’s meal program into the black.
The district served 6.2 million meals in 2013-14, according to this article in the SF Examiner. An additional 35 cents per meal applied to 6.2 million meals would drive an extra $2.17 million more in revenue for the SF school meal program, and go a very long way towards helping to wipe out the deficit.
The problem is, SNA is only asking for the 35 cents for breakfast and lunch, not for afterschool snacks or suppers (which are included in SFUSD’s 6.2 million total meals.) SNA spokesperson Diane Pratt-Heavner told me that the 35 cent request would apply to every breakfast and lunch served – free, reduced, or paid – and would include those same meals served in the Seamless Summer Feeding program, in addition to the regular school year.
If that extra 35 cents for just breakfasts and lunches had been available in 2013-14, would it have provided enough extra revenue to keep SFUSD’s meal program out of debt?
According to figures I got from SFUSD, 1,065,944 breakfasts and 4,025,795 lunches were served in 2013-14, a total of just over 5 million of these meals for the year. At 35 cents per meal, that extra revenue would have totaled about $1.782 million. Still a nice sum, but according to the SFUSD annual financial report for 2013-14, over $3 million had to be transferred into the cafeteria fund from the general fund “to cover the operating deficit.”
So, an extra 35 cents per breakfast and lunch would not be enough to bail out SFUSD’s cafeterias. Not even close.