001Okay, we are going to move on to agenda item 4.1, update of the 2025 2026 meal prices. And uh Julie Henry, hi Julie. Welcome. Julie Henry is director of nutrition and wellness and Dr. Swift will be assisting. Thank you. U Madame President, members of the board, uh and we have Julie Henry with us as well as Cindy Frank, CFO. Um, we all know that healthy food and nutrition is essential for students to learn, grow, and thrive and achieve. Uh, the critical mission that Miss Henry carries out every day is to provide nutritious meals for our students. I'm stating the obvious. Um, but as a longtime classroom teacher, I know the importance of nutritious food and for some of our students, it may be the only healthy meal and for some perhaps even the only meal
002that they have during the day. So, we take this work very seriously. I appreciate the opportunity this evening to just take a few moments to talk and um have Julie share with us the rationale and the information behind a a proposed price increase for our lunches. Uh that has become necessary in order to keep our food and nutrition uh part of our organization self- sustaining. That's very important so that our general fund dollars can be dedicated as much as possible to uh paying our staff to our salaries and benefits that are so essential also. So we've asked Miss Henry and Miss Frick will be helping her uh to just review with us the information we need to know to better understand the request for the 10 cent edition. Uh that item is not on for
003a vote this evening. We wanted to take a little time just to share the information and make sure that the members have the opportunity to ask their questions and that the community can hear all of this information. So, I appreciate you being here this evening. Miss Henry will give it to you. Absolutely. Thank you, board. Hello. Thank you, Dr. Swift. I appreciate the opportunity to come up here and share just a little bit about meal prices, how we set meal prices, how we think about meal prices um as we go forward. So level setting, we get reimbursement from the state and federal government for each full meal that we serve. The amount that we get from the state and federal government depends on the students free, reduced, and paid status. When a student uh qualifies
004for free meals, we get free meal reimbursement, which is enough to cover the entire cost of the meal. Reduced price meals, um it's all but 30 or 40 cents depending on breakfast or lunch. And then there's the paid meal price that we get. We get a small reimbursement state and federal for paid student meals, but it is not sufficient to cover the entire cost of producing the meal. Okay. So, um when paid meals are not high enough to cover paid meals plus the reimbursement plus the paid meal price isn't enough to cover the entire cost of the meal, then we are losing money on those meals, which means the reimbursement that we're getting for free and reduced price meals. we're using that to pay for paid student meals instead of using that money to improve
005the quality of our food that we we are trying to serve to all of our students. So this is why um when the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 was passed that it included a paid lunch equity requirement and some of you who have wor sat on the board for many many years have heard of the PLE and the paid lunch equity requirement that plays into this and it's because of historically needing to make sure we are raising the paid meal prices accordingly. So, um, the paid lunch equity requirement requires that we annually evaluate our paid meal prices in comparison to the federal requirements and adjust our meal prices accordingly is pretty much what it says. So, USDA says that for this next year, our weighted average price for a paid student meal should be
006$41. This past year, our current weighted average price is $38. And that's weighted. So you have your elementary, your middle, your high school prices. Your we feed more elementary paid student meals than middle or high school. So it's weighted based on the percent of meals at each grade level that you serve, which is why it's 308 instead of like a a standard average. So what we're proposing is this 10-cent increase to only the paid meal prices. The free and reduced will remain free and reduced as they always have been um of 10 cents at each grade level in order to get that weighted average price of our meals up to $3.18, which is still below the $41 that USDA recommends in order to fully cover the costs of producing a meal. So on this chart,
007what you'll see is the meal cost this this past year, our all-in cost to produce a meal was $4.75. That's food, that's labor, that's health insurance, that's paper goods. $4.75 is what it costs for us to produce a meal. Our free reimbursement, state and federal, is $4.86. Our reduced federal and state reimbursement is $446. And then there's a 40. The parents pay 40 to make that go up to the $4.86. Our paid reimbursement, state and federal, is 85. So when we have a weighted average paid meal price of $38, what we our revenue that we generate from that paid meal is $3.39. So that means we're 82 cents short. We're losing 82 cents on every meal that we serve to a paid student. And as Dr. Swift mentioned what this does is this um puts
008us in a deficit trend in our food service fund which if continues and sustains at some point the district general fund will have to step in and cover and we do not want the district general fund to step in and have to cover because we want that money to be going to the classrooms and to the teachers. So um the food service fund our department goal is to be self- sustaining. We did have a couple years where we were on a positive trajectory. That is because of COVID meals because all schools had universal free meals and they were reimbursed at the federal free rate for summer food service meals which is a different federal funding pot and a different price point which generates more revenue than regular national school lunch reimbursement. So that was a
009fluke of COVID. That is not a standard trend and we're kind of back on the standard trend again. So looking at historically now when we're talking averages because I'm going to quickly compare us to neighboring districts because I don't know our neighboring districts weighted average meal prices because I don't know what percentage of elementary, middle, and high school. We're going with a straight average. So elementary price plus middle price plus high price divided by three. So we were before COVID at 290. I need glasses for that. 290. Um then we had two years of universal free meals which was fantastic. Um so we didn't have any meal prices which was great and now then we raised it to 295 305 315. And so what we're proposing is an average um when we're talking straight average
010of $3.25 for lunch and $218 for breakfast. Looking at the surrounding districts this past year, we were higher than a lot of our counterparts. The reason why is a lot of them have not increased prices since CO. When I was talking, I called all these directors just today to make sure what their boards have approved or are planning to approve and um you see that Blue Valley is going up 30 cents. Dotto is going up 20 cents. Auburn Washurn's going up 40 cents and had a significant increase last year as well. they're catching up by doing a large price increase um in one year. Whereas we have, as you saw in those last charts, have been just steadily chipping away at it by and hoping that that is less dramatic of a change for our
011families and more manageable. Um we always do want to encourage families, every family to fill out a free and reduced meal application. It's vitally important. We know there are families out there who qualify for free and reduced price meals who aren't filling out the application. We're happy to meet with them to help them fill it out, to help them fill it out over the phone, whatever it takes to help families fill out that free and reduced application because we want everyone who does qualify for free and reduced price meals to qualify for free and reduced price meals. We'll go on to the next slide. So, what um the proposal that we're bringing to you today to be voted on, I believe next week or next next board meeting um will be a 10-centent increase across
012the board, elementary, middle, high for breakfast and for lunch with an adult meal price increase of 10 cents as well. Adult meal price as a like side note, you know, asterct at the bottom. We're required by federal law to cover the entire cost of producing the meal for adult meal prices. So that's why it's we're hitting 510. Um that's with what we're projecting of our food increases for next year. That should be fine. We do not know what the federal reimbursement rates are for next year yet. They will not be released until mid July. And obviously we don't know what the future holds for meal for food prices and supply prices for next year. So, we're, you know, making the same educated guesses on our our family grocery budget for next year as, you know,
013a standard household would. So, at that time, with that, are there any questions I can help answer? So, uh, just to, um, before I open it up to questions, I just want to remind the board that is part of our legislative priorities this year, and I'm guessing likely next year, we did, um, advocate to provide universal meals free to all students. um and will continue to do so. I also want to just clarify that when a family fills out a free and reduced lunch um form, it also qualifies them for for fee waiverss. Correct. So, they fill out the free and reduced price form and then if they qualify for free and reduced price meals, they have to fill out what's called a consent for disclosure form because the data that we receive, we are
014not allowed to share with the financial office unless that form is filled out. So there's one additional form that has to be filled out by federal law because we have to protect that free and reduced data very um purposefully and confidentially. Okay. Thank you. Okay. And then now just a second. I'm going to open it up to questions. Um start on that end. No. Uh who has questions? Can you do you mind? Okay. Well, GR we'll start at your I have one because it's it's one that that I I tend to bring up all the time. Um so for free and and reduced lunch and then for fee waiver um I always just it's less of a question more of a statement of just for the public as of a reminder that there are more
015reasons to qualify for that outside of financial. Absolutely. And so if if if you would go into some of those other reasons why people might qualify just in case they're not aware. Absolutely. So you you qualif you can qualify based on income. So that's the free and reduced application. You can also qualify if you qualify for food assistance, temporary assistance for families, um if your kid is in Head Start, if a family is home, declared homeless, migrant, runaway, um foster children. So some of those we that data we get directly from the state and we're able to qualify that way. But let's say you just qualified for food assistance, you can fill out an application, mark that on the application and it'll help us process it faster. And we always say if you're not sure,
016fill out the application because we are happy to we are happy to process more than you know to make sure that we're finding catching everyone who needs that support. We don't want anybody left out. So I would just emphasize that includes unhoused families uh that would qualify under McKenna Vento as well. Thank you. Yeah. And just to clarify that if um the board opted to offset some of the cost, it would have to come through general, this is a question for Cindy, it would have to come from the general fund. You cannot use capital outlay dollars for this expense. Correct. It wouldn't qualify for capital outlay. Um and so we would need to transfer money from either general fund or our local option budget, our supplemental general fund into food service. the buckets that we
017talked about. Um, right now we just have food service income less expense. Our balance is declining and so it may get to the point where we have to transfer money over from general fund. Okay, other questions. Um, this is my last question. the um we have historically had families who have um carry a debt and then we have had assistance from the community to help um pay those off. Can you just talk about that since we are in conversation about this right now? What that's been like for families? Do you remember was it 22,000? We had So we have a um meal support fund where we take donations. We take donations all year and then we gift out of that fund um in December and then in May to families that have negative account balances
018that have been unable to pay off those meal balances. Um we have a committee that looks at them. We prioritize families who had a negative debt and then qualified for free meals or families who were accumulating a negative debt and qualified for reduced price meals. So putting in an application um helps us determine who can who can get a who who might get a gift from the meal support fund. We do have donors who donate to a specific school. So we've we had a large donation to Lawrence High this year to um Sunset Hill to West and those funds go specifically to kids only at those schools. So we do honor specific schools or districtwide meal support fund donations. If folks wanted to make a donation, what is the process for them to do that?
019So, they can reach out to the Lawrence Schools Foundation or um we are going to be getting the link on our website back up and running. It was from a previous every year we have to reset those. So, we need to reset the next one for the upcoming school year. And ju just to to GR's point like when you when you are a family that fills out the um form for free and reduced lunch, that's based on your income from the year prior. But if a circumstance comes up, you can become eligible within a period of of um time. Correct. Yes. At any point that your income changes, you are eligible to reapply. And then once you qualify for a year, that qualification holds for the remainder of the school year. So let's say you
020lose all of your income and jobs in October. That free status because you don't have any income will hold all the way until the next school year. even if you do find a job in that meantime in order to help you get back up on your feet. Okay. And then just to reiterate, um, we feed every student that shows up at our buildings regardless of whether or not they can. Correct. Yes. Our policy is if a kid wants a lunch, we feed them a lunch. Thank you. Okay. Any other questions? Uh, this is Carol. Not so much as a question, but a comment. I do know that um personally at at Dillan's you can select a a charity if you will if you want to your your your contribution to go to. So I selected
021uh Cordley Elementary and in turn I saw where Dylan's donated over $1,000 to the cordly lunch fund. So that is another avenue for folks to look at if they are interested in helping local schools that way. Can you say again how you did that, Carol? Oh yeah, the Dillan's the Dillan's community. The Dillan's um app. Okay. Community, you can sign up as a community. The where you want your uh contribution to go to, you can sign up there at Dillan. Okay. Thanks. Other Go ahead. Yeah. I'm right now just uh struggling a bit to understand the why. Um, and not so much that I'm opposed one way or the other, but more my question is as I'm I'm listening, uh, we have a federal requirement that we cannot, uh, supplant, uh, the free and reduced
022lunch to finance the paying lunch people. So when I when I'm listening, I'm saying, "Okay, so then really what you're telling us is from a federal standpoint, this is a you got to do it. You either got to do it or you come up with the money from somewhere else." Uh because I'm sitting here going, "Okay, I don't understand uh the choice. I don't see a choice." So So this is where um you're going to get me way into the policy weeds, which I love, but I'll try to keep it really brief. Um when the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act was enacted 2010, that was the requirement. So they passed that into law and said, "You've got to meet this standard." Really quickly, districts across the country were like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. We can't increase
023prices a dollar on families in one school year." So then the USDA said, "Okay, 10 cents per year until you meet that threshold. If you don't want to hit that floor of 10 cents per year, you have to supply use non-federal funds." And that was true until 2013. So the consolidations consolidated appropriations act of 2023 made it so that if your food service fund has a positive balance at the end of the year, you can request a waiver from putting that general fund money back in. And in the state of Kansas, because of Kansas cash basis accounting laws, all food service funds in Kansas always have a positive balance. So, every school district in Kansas technically doesn't have to put those general fund dollars into it to make up that 10-cent floor, even though that
024was the purpose of the federal law back in 2010. Um, but as you could see from the price of the meals versus the the price to produce the meal versus the price to that you get for a paid meal, like we're losing money on those and at some point that's going to result in a general fund transfer even if you don't do it as a result of the PLE. Does that make sense? It makes sense. Okay. Makes sense. Basically what you're telling telling me is is basically our choice is don't do it and pay it at a general fine or do it. Do it. Um because if you don't do it, what happens is then you affect your ability to pay teachers and things like that. So and that's what you're telling us which which
025makes it more understandable. Yeah, right. And this is Carol. I echo your sentiments and frustration and we've sat here and listened to countless hours of Shannon's reports of about Topeka not fully funding our public schools. And la this time um about this time last year, we sat here and uh we listened to reports about the star bonds for the emergency meetings over at the Kansas State House where our legislators were more interested in funding a dome stadium and luring the chiefs over and that will if if they were to come over and they have till June 30th to decide on whether or not they want to come to Kansas, that will cost Kansas anywhere between two and three billion dollars to fund a stadium. So we are dealing with a legislature that is more interested
026in funding a stadium than you know in supporting our kids. Thank you. Yeah. So um looking at the chart that's kind of tracked the um food service ending fund balance. So um you know we went up with the COVID money and now we're going down. So from what I would see that in two years we would be out. So I guess my question is and I'm not saying I want to do this but my question is is 10 cents the right amount because what happens so there are there are multiple levers that we can use to try to level that out. Our goal is to be as as you know perfectly neutral budget-wise as possible. We don't want to we don't want to make money, but we don't want to lose money. We just want
027to break even every single year. So meal prices is one lever we can pull. Um we're also analyzing I mean the cost of every single entree like we're looking at that over the summer. Pricing that we can get if can we change anything with our menu. The challenge is we want to improve the quality of meals and higher quality entre cost more money. So how do we how do we negotiate that? We're we look at meals per labor hour per kitchen and there's an optimum efficiency for a kitchen. So are we, you know, we're always looking at are we overstaffed in a kitchen? Are we underststaffed in a kitchen? Where can we move our shift people? Um are there ways we can generate additional revenue in the food service fund through like allocart sales. So
028that's where um bringing in additional um vendors at the high school level to sell all of cart things. We can we can set prices on those to generate revenue. So, we're generating off of additional sales, but not off of free and reduced price meals. So, um yes, your cons your concern I feel like is accurate. And we are also looking at other levers that we can pull to try to sustain um what we're doing. Even if we don't only raise meals prices 10 cents, we'll do as much as we can to pull on those other levers to make sure we're we're neutral. Have we ever considered um like centralizing um meal production? And I know they do that in Altha. Um so um ooh there there's some history to this that I don't know. At
029one point um we did have some schools that produced um and shipped out to other schools. I don't we have never had a central kitchen like tha has. Um that facility is huge. It would be an interesting consideration. Um there are pros and cons to that and there are costs to that. And then um some argue that the quality of food declines when you cook it in a central location and then ship it out to a location, but there are cost savings potentially available, but you need to have the facility to do that and those facilities are expensive. Um, and then the LA just building on a little bit about what Carol said and um, and to Ann's point, the last thing that I wanted to talk about was um, something we talked about a
030few meetings ago, which was the some uh, cuts we had to our ability to purchase food. This is kind of going in a different direction, but it's an opportunity to have this discussion. you've done an a lot of work, like extraordinary work, trying to improve the quality of of the food that we have in our buildings. In particular, one thing that you've done that I am um really grateful for uh is to work with our local producers. That has been um more it's become more challenging. Can you speak to that um if you if you don't mind? Yeah, absolutely. So, um two pieces to that. One is we do really value our local farmers and our local food um procurement and we want to maintain that purchasing. Um the challenges are local products are generally
031more expensive. We feel like they are the freshest, they are the most delicious. Once again, higher quality products than what we get shipped in off the back of a mainline distributor truck. Um but they do come with a price tag. So, when you start looking at what levers can you pull to make sure you're breaking even, um that's one that is in the mix. I It's not the one that I would pull first. Um there was the local foods for schools um which was a federal program that um gave us about $86,000 over the last year and a half for local beef. we were able to utilize that money and we were anticipating that that funding through USDA would be renewed and then um in the last 6 months, 3 months, um that funding stream
032was taken away. So, we use that to purchase local beef. Um we're bummed that it's not there. That means that we just have to go back to our mainline distributor to purchase ground beef, which um is not as high a quality and doesn't support the local agriculture or the the local um industry as much as we would like, but we have to once again balance the the cost of the local food versus the cost from the mainline distributor. Okay. I appreciate that. Uh uh I don't appreciate that, but I I like I appreciate the I understand. Yeah. Um, other questions? Okay. Okay. So, we will take a vote on this at our uh next meeting. Perfect. Yeah. Thank you for spending time with us tonight. Absolutely. Thank you for having me.