Medford school board approves extending free lunch to students who qualify for reduced lunch

Students from families that qualify for reduced lunch will be getting free lunch starting next year under a proposal approved by members of the Medford School Board on March 27.

According to school finance director Audra Brooks, the change will impact about 148 students in the district who currently qualify for reduced price meals and will cost about $10,000 year. The money will come from the fund balance in the district’s food service account, which even after replacing many equipment items in the schools’ kitchens is sitting at about $984,000 and is projected to increase.

The federal free and reduced lunch program covers the cost of meals for students from income-qualified households, reimbursing the district for the cost of the meals. Students may either qualify for free lunch, or pay 40 cents per meal for reduced lunch.

Medford schools gets reimbursed for free and reduced lunch at a rate that is higher than what is charged to students paying full price. Program rules and codes require the food service program to be self-funding and prohibits food service funds from being spent elsewhere in the district.

“The rules are very specific with food service. I wish we could bend them, but we can’t,” Brooks said.

The district is limited by regulations from the Department of Public Instruction on how the money in the food service fund may be spent. At Monday afternoon’s finance committee meeting, Brooks explained that she has been told by the DPI that they cannot lower the rate being charged for all students and while Medford has avoided being forced to raise the full price meal rates, they could be forced to do so in the future to prevent a situation where the free and reduced lunch reimbursements are subsidizing the full-price meal rates.

Brooks explained that the district’s hands are tied about how the food service fund balance can be spent. She said the district has spent about $300,000 this year on upgrading kitchen equipment, one of the few acceptable uses.

She proposed extending the free lunch to the reduced lunch students as a way to help spend down the balance while helping local families who are struggling. Brooks said she felt inflation was hitting these lower income families hard. “This is something we can do for them,” she said.

Board member Brian Hallgren, who chairs the finance committee, questioned if they needed to wait until next school year or if they could start it now. Brooks explained the district is under contract with the DPI for how the food service is operated and said they normally don’t switch contract language in the middle of the school year.

Brooks said that in addition to expanding the free lunch program to include more children in the district, she has also completed a time study of custodians and other district staff to see what portion of their wages can be charged to the food service account for work done in that area.

While the district has generally operated the food service program at a net profit, the large fund balances in the account were primarily generated during the COVID- 19 relief period when the federal government extended free school meals to all students reimbursing the district at the federal rate for each meal served.

Board president Dave Fleegel expressed frustration with not being able to use the food service funds to provide things like after school snacks for all students or other ways to benefit all students and on the possibility that the federal government could force the district to raise fees on a program the district is already making a profit on. Brooks explained that doing a free meal for all students or after school snacks would have to be paid for by the district’s general fund and could not come out of the food service accounts. “It would have to come out of someone’s budget,” she said.

The district contracts with A’viands to staff and run the food service for the district. Brooks noted that A’viands will begin negotiating a new contract within the next few weeks and said she expected the company to seek a price increase.