Tag: lunch

  • No One Will Say Why School Lunch Costs Hawaii DOE $9 A Plate – The 74

    No One Will Say Why School Lunch Costs Hawaii DOE $9 A Plate – The 74


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    In January, the Department of Education released a shocking number: it now costs nearly $9 to produce a school lunch in Hawaiʻi. Lawmakers and advocates — after they recovered from the sticker shock — responded with a reasonable question: Why are school meals so expensive? 

    Eight months later, the public still doesn’t have an answer. Despite pressure from lawmakers, the department has yet to publish detailed information about why it costs so much to feed students. 

    The department doesn’t share — and may not even collect — campus-level data on how much individual schools are spending on meals. It has provided no breakdown of how much the state spends on items like milk or fresh produce that go into lunches.

    But lawmakers say schools need to explain what’s driving up the costs, especially since the DOE is struggling to make ends meet with its lunch program and has requested an additional $40 million from the Legislature over the past two years on top of the state and federal funds it already receives for its meal program.

    Hawaiʻi law requires the education department to charge families half the cost of producing school meals, although current lunch prices fall far below that threshold. In January, the DOE proposed gradually raising meal prices over the next four years, but state lawmakers stepped in with funds to avoid increasing costs for families.  

    Under the DOE’s proposal, lunch for elementary and middle school students would cost $4.75 by 2028. High schoolers would pay $5 for meals. 

    Breaking Down The Numbers 

    The DOE serves more than 18 million meals every year to students across 258 campuses. This spring, lawmakers set aside roughly $50 million to fund the school meal program over the next two years. 

    The department publishes quarterly financial reports for its food services branch, but the online reports only track the total amount of money coming in and out of the meals program. Through the third quarterof the 2024-25 school year, the program brought in $108 million in student payments and state and federal funds, but spent roughly $123 million on meals, salaries and other expenses.

    In response to a Civil Beat public records request for school and state-level spending on lunches this spring, a representative from the superintendent’s office shared a one-page financial report breaking down the meal program’s spending and revenue in more detail. Roughly 40% of the 2023-24 budget went toward the salaries and benefits of workers, and the department spent roughly $81 million on food. 

    But there was little information explaining what goes into a $9 school meal — for example, how much the department spent on specific ingredients or juice, or what cafeteria supplies cost the department more than $5.6 million in 2024. The department provides more detailed estimates of its purchase of local ingredients in its annual report to the Legislature, but this spending makes up only 5% of the school meal budget.

    In response to Civil Beat’s request, the DOE also said it didn’t have records of schools’ annual financial reports for campus meal programs. The department did not respond to requests for interviews about the availability of school meal data and the rising costs of lunches.

    Jesse Cooke, vice president of investments and analytics at Ulupono Initiative, said he’s concerned about a lack of consistent tracking and reporting from schools. He said he hasn’t seen any data breaking down the costs of meal programs at individual schools on a regular basis, which makes it harder for the department and lawmakers to identify what’s driving up the costs of meals and understand how programs can operate more efficiently. 

    “When you’re trying to make decisions, trying to make something more efficient, you need pretty quick numbers,” Cooke said. “They’re not looking at specific schools and their numbers.”

    The education department has also come under fire from the federal government for its lack of data collection. When Hawaiʻi sought an increase in federal funds for school meals in 2015, officials denied the request because the department wasn’t able to provide enough details on the costs of its lunches, said Daniela Spoto, director of food equity at Hawaiʻi Appleseed Center for Law and Economic Justice. 

    “Historically, the only thing they could provide is what they provided here,” Spoto said. “Here’s our cost, and here’s the total number of meals we provide.” 

    Lawmakers passed two resolutions this spring asking the department to produce a detailed breakdown of its meal programs, including the cost of ingredients, beverages and supplies. The DOE currently has no process of reporting and publishing such costs, the resolutions stated.

    “It is essential to ensure that proper reporting processes are in place to provide transparency as to the costs of producing school meals,” one resolution said. 

    DOE leaders argued they publish enough information to justify rising lunch costs, but they’ve given lawmakers mixed messages on the data that’s readily available. 

    In one hearing, Interim School Food Services Branch Administrator Sue Kirchstein said the DOE already collects and publishes data on the costs of ingredients and other factors going into school meals. But another official said the DOE doesn’t collect data with the level of detail lawmakers were requesting, and the department’s communications team was unable to provide the report Kirchstein mentioned during the hearing. 

    Besides looking at rising inflation rates, the department hadn’t completed a detailed analysis of what’s increasing the costs of meals, former Deputy Superintendent Dean Uchida said in another hearing this spring, drawing strong criticism from lawmakers. 

    “You should be looking at it, and maybe there’s a different way that you can do things,” Sen. Troy Hashimoto said during the hearing. “But you won’t know that unless you do the analysis.” 

    The department has not said if it’s working on a cost analysis for the Legislature. Any report DOE submits to lawmakers won’t be published until late 2025 or early 2026 in the lead-up to the new legislative session. 


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  • No Free Lunch? But for Some, Harvard is Now Free

    No Free Lunch? But for Some, Harvard is Now Free

    Emil GuillermoAre  you or your kids ready for Harvard?

    It’s free.

    As in F-R-E-E, free. At least for most families where the household income is $200,000 or below.

    Of course, you still have to pass the standards of the school’s admissions board.  But don’t assume that means straight-A’s and perfect scores.

    You can just be you. If you feel you are truly special and worthy.

    But now money, or class, shouldn’t get in the way.

    And no one has to mention that bad word these days: Race.

    So, if you’ve been shooting for two years at your local JUCO, followed by two years at the big state school, in order to save money, aim higher. Harvard has had alumni like Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first African American woman to the high court. There’s Alvin Bragg, the District Attorney of New York who successfully prosecuted Donald Trump in the Stormy Daniels/Hush Money case.

    In the arts, there’s Courtney B. Vance, the actor, who played a lawyer, the O.J. Simpson defense attorney Johnnie Cochran, in FX’s “American Crime story.”  Vance is now running to be an overseer at the Harvard.

    And now after what Harvard did this week, you or your kids could be the next Ketanji Brown Jackson, Alvin Bragg, or Courtney B. Vance.

    Harvard’s decision follows the path of other schools that have come to the conclusion, that elite schools like Stanford and MIT,  can afford to be more magnanimous to more people, especially those potential students and families who aren’t wealthy. 

    These days, a household income of $200,000 a year is unfortunately just a decent middle class income. It’s a family of a nurse and mid-level manager. An administrator and a fire fighter. Maybe some overtime involved.

    Previously, the income number for Harvard was set at around $85,000 which is fairly modest, but more like households of two fast food managers. It’s also not as realistic in terms of attracting the most people who might give Harvard a second look. Some of course will,  but at that income level, the pool is relatively small. There are more first-time college admits.

    By lifting the income level, the number of people broadens to include more college educated households, and helps the school lose the tag of being elitist. There’s also likely to be a more diverse racial pool.

    And that may be the prime motivator of going free. It overcomes the hurdle placed by the Supreme Court that bars the use of race in admissions through the process often called “affirmative action.”

    Subsequent to that ruling, diversity at Harvard had taken a hit. Indeed, the school has been so gun-shy about using or talking about race in order not to violate the SCOTUS ruling.  But with an expanded pool, maybe the numbers of Black and Latino students improve.

    It’s a workaround to get by the legal roadblocks put up by those against race and diversity. And it gets past the biggest obstacle about a school like Harvard.

    It’s always been, “can I afford the $80-90,000 it costs to go there?”

    Harvard isn’t the first to reach out in this way. In many ways, Harvard was forced to. But why did it take so long?

    Harvard is well-endowed. Harvard could always afford it. They could call it a scholarship, but it just makes better marketing sense to say Harvard is Free. Still, we all know there’s no free lunch, will Harvard really be free? Will there be a stigma attached to getting in free?

    If people know, will that impact one’s status among those who want to preserve the school’s elitist tag? As an alumnus, I like the idea. But then when I applied, my family relied exclusively on  Social Security and SSI. An income of $200,000 is middle-class in America. There will be more diversity in this group, without trying to appeal to race.

    If this is the way to overcome the legal attacks on race-based admissions, and a bad  SCOTUS decision, that’s great. It’s premeditated accidental social justice. It also shows there’s a way to fight all the present anti-DEI, anti-higher ed decisions, if colleges can be ever more creative with costs and accounting.

     But the upside is worth it. Schools that may have seemed distant and unreachable can act more for the public good than they ever have. Removing the cost factor makes sense. Harvard isn’t a public school. But at least now to a segment, it’s free.

    Emil Guillermo is a journalist, commentator, and former adjunct professor. You can reach him at www.amok.com

     

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  • How Spokane Public Schools is helping kids engage in real life

    How Spokane Public Schools is helping kids engage in real life

    Key points:

    Social media has connected kids like never before, but what they get in likes and shares, they lose in real, meaningful engagement with their peers and classmates. Lunch hours are spent hunched over smartphones, and after-school time means less sports and more Snapchat.

    The adverse effects of this excessive screen time have significantly impacted students’ social- emotional health. Forty-one percent of teens with the highest social media usage struggle with mental health issues, and between 2010 and 2020, anxiety among adolescents skyrocketed by 106 percent.

    At Spokane Public Schools (SPS), educators and administrators are reversing the side effects of social media by re-connecting with students through school-based extracurricular activities. Through its transformative Engage IRL (Engage in Real Life) initiative, the district is encouraging kids to get off their devices and onto the pickleball court, into the swimming pool, and outside in the fresh air. With more than 300 clubs and sports to choose from, SPS students are happier, healthier, and less likely to reach for their smartphones.

    An innovative approach to student engagement

    Even before the pandemic, SPS saw levels of engagement plummet among the student population, especially in school attendance rates, due in part to an increase in mental health issues caused by social media. Rebuilding classroom connections in the era of phone-based childhoods would require district leaders to think big.

    “The question was not ‘How do we get kids off their phones?’ but ‘How do we get them engaged with each other more often?’” said Ryan Lancaster, executive director of communications for SPS. “Our intent was to get every kid, every day, involved in something positive outside the school day and extend that community learning past the classroom.” 

    To meet the district’s goal of creating a caring and connected community, in 2022, school leaders formed a workgroup of parents, community members, coaches, and teachers to take inventory of current extracurriculars at all district schools and identify gaps in meeting students’ diverse interests and hobbies.

    Engaging with students was a top priority for workgroup members. “The students were excited to be heard,” explained Nikki Otero Lockwood, SPS board president. “A lot of them wanted an art club. They wanted to play board games and learn to knit. No matter their interests, what they really wanted was to be at school and be connected to others.”

    Working with community partners and LaunchNW, an Innovia Foundation initiative focused on helping every child feel a sense of belonging, SPS launched Engage IRL–an ambitious push to turn students’ ideas for fun and fulfillment into real-life, engaging activities.

    Over the past two years, Engage IRL has been the catalyst for increasing access and opportunities for K-12 students to participate in clubs, sports, arts activities, and other community events. From the Math is Cool Club and creative writing classes to wrestling and advanced martial arts, kids can find a full range of activities to join through the Elite IRL website. In addition, five engagement navigators in the district help connect families and students to engagement opportunities through individual IRL Plans and work with local organizations to expand programming.

    “All day, every day, our navigators are working to break down barriers and tackle challenges to make sure nothing gets in the way of what kids want to be involved in and engaged in,” said Stephanie Splater, executive director of athletics and activities for SPS. “For example, when we didn’t have a coach for one of the schools in our middle school football program, our navigators mobilized for really good candidates in a short amount of time just from their personal outreach.”

    In only two years, student engagement in extracurriculars has nearly doubled. Furthermore, according to Lancaster, since the Engage IRL launch, SPS hasn’t experienced a day where it dipped below 90 percent attendance. 

    “That’s an outlier in the past few years for us, for sure, and we think it’s because kids want to be at school. They want to be engaged and be part of all the cool things we’re doing. We’ve had a really great start to the 2024-2025 school year, and Engage IRL has played a huge role.”

    Engage IRL also helped SPS weather student blowback when the district launched a new cell phone policy this year. The policy prohibits cell phone use in elementary and middle school and limits it to lunch and periods between classes for high school students. Because students were already building personal connections with classmates and teachers through Engage IRL, many easily handled social media withdrawal.

    Creating opportunities for all kids

    Key to Engage IRL’s success was ensuring partnerships and programs were centered in equity, allowing every child to participate regardless of ability, financial or transportation constraints, or language barriers.

    Establishing a no-cut policy in athletics by creating additional JV and C teams ensured kids with a passion for sports, but not college-level skills, continued to compete on the court or field. Partnering with Special Olympics also helped SPS build new unified sports programs that gave children with disabilities a chance to play. And engagement navigators are assisting English language learners and their families in finding activities that help them connect with kids in their new country.

    For Otero Lockwood, getting her daughter with autism connected to clubs after years of struggling to find school activities has been life-changing.

    “There are barriers to finding community for some kids,” she shared. “We know kids with disabilities are more likely to be underemployed as adults and not as connected to the community. This is something we have the power to do that will have a lasting impact on the children we serve.”

    Through Engage IRL, SPS has redefined student engagement by expanding access and opportunity to 6,000 students across 58 schools. In just two short years, the district has seen attendance increase, student wellness improve, and dependence on smartphones diminish. By continuing to listen to the needs of students and rallying the community to partner on out-of-school activities, Spokane Public Schools is successfully fostering the face-to-face connections every child needs to thrive.

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