RSU board maintains student lunch prices

  CARIBOU, Maine — School lunches avoided a price increase during the RSU 39 School Board meeting on June 4.
Instead, to meet federal stipulations on the price of school meals, the RSU 39 school directors agreed to transfer $10,345 of non-federal funds to school lunch services.
Food Services Director for RSU 39 Louise Bray explained to the board that there were three ways to be compliant with the guidelines: raise prices, supplement the school lunch funds with non-federal funding, or a combination of both.
Currently, pre-K through fifth-grade lunches are $1.85, sixth- through eighth-grade lunches are $2 and high school lunches cost $2.25.
Bray explained that the governmental standards want the school lunches to be $2.98, which is the dollar amount the federal government reimburses schools for each student receiving a free meal.
In striving to reach that $2.98 goal, however, schools are not permitted to increase costs to students by more than 10 cents per year — even if that means never actually meeting the goal price.
Board Chair Clifford Rhome inquired as to whether staving school lunch price increases would lead to a large price increase down the road, but Bray assured it would not.
Board members agreed with Bray’s recommendation to transfer funds to school lunch services in lieu of raising costs to students.
In 2013-14, RSU 39’s budget allocated $49,000 to be transferred to the school’s nutrition program, and that number decreased to $45,000 for 2014-15. The $10,345 that will be transferred comes from the existing allocation, and does not require additional funding being raised.
“We already support school lunch services in the budget; this would be taking credit for the non-federal funds equity applied to make that program solvent in any way,” Superintendent Frank McElwain said to the board members. “It would prevent raising the prices for meals, and keep us from losing student participation.”
Over the past two years, Bray said that increased prices from a few years ago and increased federal regulations on food content and portions have decreased overall student participation in the school lunch program.
“When we raised prices that year and the new regulations went into effect, I lost 10,000 lunches that year and almost 5,000 lunches,” the Food Services Director explained.