One of the ways the federal government directed pandemic relief funding was to provide more food cost reimbursements and issue waivers to schools that enabled them to offer free meals to all students, regardless of income. However, that program was not part of the federal spending bill to fund the government for the upcoming year. While the full impact is not yet known, some parents and teachers are concerned about losing universal free school meals if the June 30 federal waiver is not extended. We’re joined by nutrition services directors from two Oregon school districts: Nathan Roedel from the Hillsboro School District, and Anne Leavens with Central Point in Southern Oregon.
Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: Soon after the pandemic hit, the federal government sprang into action to change the way K-12 meal programs work around the country. Congress let the U.S. Department of Agriculture give districts much more flexibility in terms of making and delivering food. Lawmakers also provided more money so schools could give free meals to all students. But the waivers are set to end on June 30th. For more on what these waivers have meant for Oregon students and what the return to the old system could mean, I’m joined by two nutrition services directors. Nathan Roedel works in the Hillsboro School District. Anne Leavens is in Central Point in southern Oregon. Welcome to both of you.
Anne Leavens, first. My understanding is that the reimbursements and requirements from the federal government are pretty complicated, but in basic terms, can you explain how the government’s rules changed during the pandemic?
Anne Leavens: They helped make it easier for us to offer meals to students and community. So they waved area eligibility, they waved a lot of things like we don’t have enough time to go over all of it. But they basically let us feed all kids [ages]1-18 for free with the expectation that we’re still feeding under the meal pattern requirements and whatnot. But they did make it somewhat easier, which has been great, and allowed not just to serve our students at school but also serve our community families as well.
Miller: Nathan Roedel, what did that mean for kids in Hillsboro schools?
Nathan Roedel: Well I think it depends on the year, right? So when we started, these flexibilities allowed us to get meals out of our walls and into where people were. And a lot of school districts scrambled to use what they had on hand to get food out to kids or at least provide a spot for families to come to pick up food to take home.
Miller: Just to be clear, without those changes, you couldn’t have done that. You would have had to, if you wanted federal reimbursement, serve them in congregate, in the lunchrooms as opposed to putting bags in buses and having those bags delivered?
Roedel: Exactly, that’s correct.
Miller: So that was at the beginning, and the beginning lasted for a while obviously, with remote school. But when kids got back to buildings, what were you able to do that you couldn’t do before?
Roedel: I think you have to go back to the intent of the flexibilities and they were, really, to help kids have access to meals when things are unstable. So it allowed us to hand things out that normally we would have to speak more specifically on. You’ve got to remember that what we serve kids is based on - when we were kids it was the food pyramid - but now it’s called “my plate”. But we’re supposed to hand out all these components for a nutritious meal to kids. And so we encourage them to make choices. But in this case it was that we could put things together and hand them out whether they were on site or whether they were at home. Whereas, we all know when we were kids, it was like institutional food service. You come through a line and you have a few choices and you go sit down. So it’s quite a diversion from the norm.
Miller: When you got back to having kids in school, how much did the availability of free lunch for everyone increase the number of kids who chose to eat school provided lunch in Central Point?
Leavens: We increased quite a bit. We’d actually had really good participation pre-COVID and we were running community eligible schools, another program the government offers that allows us to feed all kids for free. The biggest impact was at our high school and our middle school which were not community eligible. So this was the first time those students were able to eat for free without needing to put their name into a computer and all that fun stuff that we do. And that was a big increase. And it was really awesome just being able to be efficient and get all the kids fed.
And it was so different how we were serving when school resumed last spring, 2021. Not having to serve in a traditional way just made our life a lot easier. We were already serving in mostly grab-and-go, packaging food to go and serving them in cohorts or classrooms. It was just really nice to be able to do that. And for this year where schools felt a little more pre-COVID, it’s just been nice that all kids have been able to come in and eat and not be concerned about what status they are or if they have money or anything like that. And it’s also continued to help our middle school and our high school where they normally wouldn’t have that program to take advantage of.
Miller: Have you too seen an increase in the number of Hillsboro students, at whatever grades, who are eating school lunch because now it’s free?
Roedel: Oh, definitely. Yeah, especially just like Anne was saying at the secondary level. In our middle high schools, our participation is up around between 40 and 50%, whereas we were hovering down the lower end of 30 with regular paid pricing.
Miller: Was there a stigma in the past for accepting a free meal, especially as kids get into the older grades?
Roedel: Definitely. Yeah, I think that’s the one thing we really fight against in middle and high school - the perception that if you’re getting a hot lunch, you must need it so you’re a “free kid”. You know, kids are so aware now about what services are out there and who accesses them.
Miller: How do you fight that stigma?
Roedel: You know, that’s a good question. I think we kind of tried to walk around it a little bit by promoting what products we have, whether it be a name brand pizza or the health of it, to promote it to people who may not need it as much as they have a choice with it. But definitely these waivers have removed a lot of those barriers and I’m hoping that some of that perception carries on as people graduate through grades.
Miller: We’re talking right now about the coming end of the federal waiver that has provided, among other things, free school lunch to all students as a result of the pandemic. We’re talking to two directors of nutrition services in two different Oregon school districts. I saw the Time Magazine interview about this issue with a nutrition services director in a California school district, who said that a year ago, I think it was, she couldn’t source a dark green vegetable for student lunches. But because of the waiver she was able to sub in carrots. I think this gets to the intricacies of the federal requirements you all have to follow. So is it the case that something like that - a substitution like that - wouldn’t have been possible in the past?
Leavens: Exactly yes. I’m trying to recall pre-COVID. I don’t know that we had a lot of options for modifying our meal pattern. And fortunately they did give us that waiver authority for the past two years. I don’t know about Nate because obviously we’re in two opposite parts of the state. I am assuming he has the same problems I have. We haven’t had the produce problem that our colleague in California has had. But I’ve had problems in every other area of our meal pattern. Whole grains specifically have probably been the hardest for us to procure on a regular basis.
Miller: And when you say that, is that an availability question or a price question?
Leavens: It’s all availability.
Miller: You can’t get whole grains?
Leavens: Well I mean we can, on and off, but [for example] tortillas have been like one of our biggest challenges this year. And where normally we would never serve a white flour tortilla - it would be all whole grain or whole wheat. But it’s that we haven’t consistently been able to get those since, I think, September. And [it is the] same with a lot of other items. Where we thought we’d be getting a certain pizza item, made by a specific company making K-12 products, you get an email one day saying ‘well we’re not making this any more and we hope to return to production in July’.
Or with a lot of our higher-end chicken products that are made specifically for K-12, the company we’ve been buying from stopped making them completely. They say ‘I hope they come back’. But each week it feels like there’s more items that are no longer available with the hope that they get returned. But I don’t feel like things are going to be better for us for a while. And that doesn’t even discuss our staffing shortage. So it’s been a struggle and it’s going to be hard not having these waivers, definitely, to meet the rules of our program.
Miller: What has sourcing, and we will get to staffing in a second, what does sourcing look like in Hillsboro?
Roedel: Oh, it’s been tough. We started out this year ordering things and then not coming or what does come is half of what we ordered. In one circumstance, we pushed to another source and then we got a consumer product to fill the gap. I worked with a local business to try and provide a whole grain option for breakfast and they stepped up and helped us out. But yet we still continue. I mean, I haven’t been able to get beef patties from our selected vendor all year. Yet we have an entitlement that we dedicated for that commodity that we haven’t been able to use. So yeah, unfortunately, the supply chain is affecting us on every side, internally as well as on the sourcing side.
Miller: Inflation also hits you in terms of your ability to buy food for students?
Leavens: Yes, it’s crazy how expensive things are. We are, I guess you could say, fortunate right now that we’re getting a higher reimbursement rate and because we’re getting all meals reimbursed at free. But I’m looking for all possible ways to increase revenue for next school year, just so that we can help manage inflation and labor costs. I don’t know what our increased labor costs are going to be because our unions are negotiating right now. But I anticipate that to be close to inflation on food costs as well.
Miller: Is there a way to increase revenue besides charging students who are, at that point we assume, going to be paying for their lunches, without just charging them more?
Leavens: No. Nate will have to correct me if we haven’t. There’s this tool called the Paid Lunch Equity Tool and it’s how we set our paid meal prices. Traditionally, they don’t want you increasing meal prices exponentially. I don’t. I’m assuming we can set them to whatever we want, but that’s going to be an intriguing scenario when we get there. I don’t know. Nate, are you guys at that point yet?
Roedel: Yeah, that tool looks at participation for the previous year in your ‘paid’ category. But we haven’t had that participation since 2018-19. Like it’s all been free up until that point.
Miller: Meaning that the current numbers, there’s just no guide because you’re assuming that fewer people are going to be getting school lunch going forward?
Roedel: Well everybody that’s been getting school lunches has been getting it free. So we don’t have data. But also it’s self-defeating because those people that are most often on that scale, where they’re paying for lunches, they get to make that choice right? And so if you raise the price too high, your participation is gonna drop. So the net outcome is going to be less revenue than, maybe, if you’d only gone up 10 cents. So it really is going to be interesting on that side.
Leavens: And, going into COVID, we had $40,000 in meal balanced debt that was accrued from the beginning of September 2019 through March 2020. So we can set the price at anything, but it doesn’t really matter. If a kid is going to eat, the kid’s going to eat whether they pay for their meal or not.
Miller: I’m not sure what you mean by that?
Leavens: In Oregon, which I’m 100% supportive of, we are required to feed all students and we are not to discuss meal balances or accounts, anything with a child, which is great. I love that. But say a kid doesn’t have to pay. We send notifications, we call home, we connect with guardians. But kids can accrue paid debt and it just sits there, in our situation, until they graduate or leave the school district. So we carry significant meal debt when kids are paying.
Miller: And the only question is how much the federal government will reimburse for families who actually qualify for free or reduced lunch. But for those who don’t, it’s up to you to make up the difference?
Leavens: Yes, exactly.
Miller: Just to fast forward to the potential or perhaps the likely future - come June 30th, the waiver that’s given you more flexibility, more freedom to get food to students in different ways and also to offer free lunch to everybody, that’s most likely going to go away. In the big picture, what do you think that’s going to mean for Oregon students?
Roedel: Well, I think it’s going to feel different. I don’t think it’s gonna be a direct meaning. But a lot of the options that they’ve had, we’re gonna start talking to their parents about bringing money. We’re going to start talking about them choosing their half cup of fruit and vegetable and taking the milk every time. [We’re going to be] retraining parents on applying for meals, which has gone down during the pandemic. And [we’re going to be] retraining even the staff and the schools about what we can and can’t do. So I think the feel around school food service is what’s going to change the most next year.
Miller: What are you expecting in Central Point?
Leavens: I agree with Nate. It’s going to be a lot of marketing and full court press to parents to apply. The one bonus for us in Oregon is we have the Oregon Extended Income Guideline that is part of the state activity tax that helps give more access to free meals. So it basically says that at the federal level, this is how you qualify. We’re going to make it a little bit easier and Oregon’s government is going to cover those meal costs. So for us, we haven’t been able to access that because it was supposed to start last school year, 2021. So I guess, if we’re looking at the positive side, we’re gonna advertise that like crazy and really work with our schools to get all families to apply because they just might qualify under the Oregon Extended Income Guidelines.
Miller: And just briefly, setting aside the question of the money here, the ability to offer lunch for free to all students. Is there any other part of the waiver that you would most want to hold onto aside from the money?
Roedel: Aside from the money, I think it’s the flexibilities on meal pattern because we’re still dealing with sourcing issues. So if we can’t get, like Anne was saying, a grain, which we’re still struggling with, it takes a lot of documentation on our site to justify that. And then when the state comes around and reviews our program, we don’t want those violations, right? And so I think for me it’s meal pattern, the meal plan or pattern flexibilities that I wish they would continue.
Miller: Nathan Roedel and Anne Leavens, thanks very much for joining us today. This was fascinating.
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