School
lunch prices increase
Higher cost of
food, fuel blamed
Tuesday, September 07, 2004 • BY MIKE FRASSINELLI
• Star-Ledger Staff
Students across New Jersey
this year are getting their biggest economics lessons not in
the classroom, but in the lunchroom.
The rising cost of milk,
fuel, fruit and labor has forced a nationwide spike in
school lunch costs, with one school district in California
raising cafeteria prices a full dollar.
The average cost of a high
school lunch in America is $1.66. Middle school lunches
average $1.61 and elementary school lunches are
$1.43.
Prices tend to run higher
in New Jersey, and the latest increases won't help. For
example, the cost of lunch at Warren County's Great Meadows
Middle School went up 35 cents to $2.25, an 18 percent hike,
while Blairstown Elementary School pupils had to fork over
an additional Franklin Delano Roosevelt dime and Thomas
Jefferson nickel as prices went up 15 cents to $2 per
lunch.
"Overall, it's a
significant amount, but I am not going to deny him his
(cafeteria) lunch," said Nancy Caramico, the incoming
president of Great Meadows Middle School's parent teacher
organization and mother of a seventh-grader at the
school.
Her son, Nicolas, wasn't
thrilled by the increase. It meant not having enough money
left over for a snack on his first day of school, although
he did get one on day two.
"Nobody made too much of a
big deal over it," his mother said. "A few people pointed
out that the kids got new textbooks. You don't mind paying a
little more for lunch when he comes home with three new
textbooks."
However, Principal Tim
Purnell said he has heard from parents concerned about the
increase.
"I think you are going to
see a lot more packed lunches," he predicted.
In Vineland, the school
board decided to swallow an expected $700,000 food service
deficit rather than pass along a 40 cent per lunch increase
to cash-strapped families in town.
"Vineland is an Abbott
district, and we do have some very economically challenged
families in our district," school board member Jackie
Gavigan said. "Maybe for some people a 40 cent increase
isn't much. But if you have three children, it adds
up."
Vineland has tried to make
up some of the deficit by charging a little more for a la
carte items, and Gavigan said the school board might have no
choice but to revisit the question of whether it should
charge more for school lunches.
Laura Roberts, a district
manager and dietitian with Nu-Way Concessionaires, a
Kearny-based supplier of food to around 10,000 New Jersey
students, including those in West New York and North Bergen
and Wood-Ridge, said the company had to be creative to
prevent increases this year.
It has charged more for a
la carte items and non-essentials such as potato chips and
fruit drinks. It also dropped a program that gave students a
discount for paying a month in advance.
"When it comes to school
lunch, we don't like to raise the prices," said Roberts,
past president of the New Jersey School Food Service
Association.
The mandate to curb
obesity in America is good for the waistline, but not the
bottom line. It costs more to provide healthier foods, such
as low-fat cheese for pizza.
And it also costs more, in
labor, to satisfy finicky eaters.
"You can't just put an
apple on the line anymore," Roberts said. "They want cut
apples with the dipping sauce."
But that requires paying
someone to cut the apples.
The higher cost of milk
and fruit -- and the higher cost of gasoline for the trucks
that transport that milk and fruit -- has led some schools
to pass on the costs to students.
A survey by Education Week
found increases of 30 cents in Atlanta, 10 cents in Boston
and $1 in California's Galt Joint Union High
School.
"It seems across the board
that more districts are doing it this year," said Erik
Peterson, a spokesman for the School Nutrition Association.
"Some don't raise it more than once every 10 years, and
others do it 5 cents every year to kind of keep
up."
At Great Meadows Regional
School District, business administrator Christina Sharkey
said the district increased lunch prices to the maximum
amount allowed by the state's Bureau of Child Nutrition --
$2.25 in the middle school and $2.10 in the two elementary
schools -- to close a cafeteria deficit of up to $35,000 a
year.
"This year we'll go to the
max, and hopefully that will help reduce (the deficit) ,"
Sharkey said. "I don't think we'll hear too much, because
our price had always been much lower than
allowed."
At Blairstown Elementary,
prices were held in check for several years before this
year's 15 cent increase, Superintendent W. Michael Feeney
said.
"When we got hit with
these increases in milk costs, we just put it in," Feeney
said. "Hopefully, we won't have another one for three or
four years."
Copyright 2004 The Star-Ledger. Used by NJ.com with
permission.
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