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an official said. But all Superintendent Jim Busta has seen is teens bringing sack lunches Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays.
School officials in Spring Grove have tried new measures this year to carry the district’s food service account out of the red. In other districts, officials have increased the prices for hot lunches and offered more food choices to boost revenue amid rising food costs.
Busta said declining student participation in his school’s lunch program contributed to a $10,530 deficit.
“When it comes to school lunch ... you can go into deficit spending, but the auditor only lets you do it for so many years and then you have to pay out of the general fund,” he said.
To potentially avoid using dollars that could be spent elsewhere, Spring Grove’s school board closed the campus three days a week and raised lunch prices by 10 cents at all grade levels earlier this year, Busta said.
“We are hoping serving more meals might reverse this trend,” he said. “So far it doesn’t seem to be doing this.”
The Spring Grove school board will examine how the closed campus is working for the high school in January.
Rushford-Peterson High School closed its campus after floods last year, and now more students are eating hot lunches than before.
It’s partly because of the closed campus and partly because more students in the district now qualify for free or reduced lunches after the floods, said Joyce Miller, the district’s food service director. The government reimburses the school for free or reduced lunches.
In Winona, fewer students are eating hot lunches, but the district has actually had a slight increase in the amount of students eating district food. That’s because many students eat a la carte, district financial director Jeff Seeley said.
“In our traditional hot lunch line, we see a little less, but our choice numbers are up,” he said.
But like many districts, rising food prices prompted the Winona district in April to increase lunch prices by 10 cents. Seeley said he doesn’t expect another increase any time soon.
“Our goal is always to keep the prices as low as possible,” he said. “So if prices stabilized, we wouldn’t anticipate doing it (again next year).”
grits wrote on Dec 4, 2008 10:50 AM: