School district working to cut costs of food service

The Sisters School District is taking a critical look at its Nutrition Services program. This year the district budgeted $100,000 from its general fund to subsidize the program. At the request of school board member Christine Jones, the district is evaluating ways to reduce this amount.

"We are looking at how we could move the program into the black or at least closer," said superintendent Elaine Drakulich.

Recently a consultant hired by the High Desert Educational Service District (HDESD) to evaluate meal programs at all HDESD schools provided the school district with some suggestions for increasing profits and cutting costs.

According to district facilities supervisor Leland Bliss, this consultant recommended a marketing campaign that targets both Sisters schools themselves and the community as a whole with the hope of making the district's Nutrition Services program more attractive to parents and students.

"School lunch has never been cool," said Janice Comfort, who heads the district's Nutrition Services program, "We're fighting that."

According to Comfort, an effective marketing program will help parents realize that it's "...a healthy choice for their child to eat school lunch rather than maybe risking sending something that might not be safe for the child to eat because it's sitting at room temperature."

This year participation in the Nutrition Services program is about 28 percent at the high school, close to 38 percent at the middle school and approximately 58 percent at the elementary school, Comfort told The Nugget. Her hope is that the planned marketing campaign will help to raise middle school participation to 65 percent and that at the elementary school to 75 percent. She projects little change at the high school, as with the school's open campus policy, 28 percent participation is about what is to be expected.

One of the reasons the Sisters School District has always had a problem breaking even with its Nutrition Services program is because of the low percentage of district students who qualify for the National School Lunch Program, a federally assisted program that provides free or reduced priced lunches to students every day.

"We are very low free and reduced, so we don't have enough of an audience. School districts get a lot more money back from the state from free and reduced than they do if a student qualifies for pay (when the student pays the full cost of his or her lunch out of pocket)," said Comfort.

The district receives 20 cents from the state for a paid student, $2.09 for a student who qualifies for reduced price meals and $2.47 for those who qualify for free meals.

High school principal Bob Macauley told The Nugget that the number of mandated rules and regulations the Nutrition Services program must follow makes the program very cumbersome.

"I think as they identify places where they can save money, costs will come down," he said.

Bliss has already identified some of those areas. He hopes to cut costs by initiating additional training for staff.

"Right now when it comes to the actual finances, food costs and labor that play into everything, the individual kitchen manager's biggest concern is to cook food. They need to be trained to understand how to help control their own food costs," said Bliss.

Bliss is also initiating a cost analysis for all menu items.

"When we write menus, we need to always evaluate how much the entrée items that we're serving cost and make sure we're putting together a menu that's balanced," he said. "Each month you want to try and establish a baseline food cost, and you want to try to stay under that."

Already Bliss is cutting costs. He has eliminated pre-packaged items at the variety and salad bars.

"Students can get all of fruits and vegetables that they want, but some of the items that were on there were pre-packaged and a little more expensive, things like animal crackers," said Bliss.

This year lunch at Sisters High School costs $3.25, a figure that is $1.25 higher than in Bend and $1 more than in Redmond.

We're pretty comparable at the middle school and elementary levels," said Comfort.

Lunch costs $2.50 at the middle school and $2.20 at the elementary school.