Cold lunches symptom of broader challenges

CLARK FORK — Food: it’s a basic necessity. Go without it, even for a relatively short time, and the human mind tends to shift its focus from the task at hand to fulfilling the body’s need to eat.

That’s the dilemma — and distraction — that students, parents, and Lake Pend Oreille School District officials have been grappling with recently at Clark Fork Jr./Sr. High school.

Some parents are upset because the district stopped serving hot food this year.

“We’re doing things to keep the school viable,” Superintendent Shawn Woodward said.

LPOSD stopped serving hot breakfast at the close of the 2013-2014 school year. Then in November it quit serving hot lunches for it’s Clark Fork students, replacing them with cold bag lunches. It was the final straw for some low income parents who rely on the meals to feed their school-aged children.

“It was a blow when they took breakfast away,” parent Jennifer Stamper said. “Now they took lunches.”

Kids were less than enthusiastic about the contents of the bag lunches.

“It’s not really that filling,” 16-year-old Talon Stamper said of the lunches during an interview with a handful of students and parents Tuesday in Clark Fork. “It’s always the same four different things over and over again.”

Talon and his sister, Shaydell, shared stories of warm, even curdled milk, “really cheap, skinny” pizza, and packaged food near or even beyond its expiration date.

“Obviously the children aren’t happy about that,” parent Caryl Abbott said.

Superintendent Shawn Woodward reacted sharply to reports of warm milk, and lunches left out of the school’s cooler.

“That’s absolutely inaccurate,” he said, although he didn’t deny that a student may have had a warm milk. “But it didn’t come out of the cooler.”

Woodward immediately looked into how food was being handled and stored when he heard milk may have been warm, he said. He failed to identify a systemic problem.

According to Woodward, the food is prepared in one of the district’s licensed kitchens and stored in a cooler until it’s delivered to Clark Fork in a “cold case.” It’s again stored in a climate-controlled cooler when it arrives at the school in Clark Fork until lunches are distributed to students.

The school was receptive to student and parental complaints about the lunches, however. Woodward dispatched the district’s nutritionist, child nutrition director Bobbie Coleman, to ask students what they wanted in their lunches. Feedback from the 35 students who participated resulted in an expanded bag lunch menu. That menu was attached to a letter Woodward sent to parents this week addressing the overall lunch issue.

Some Clark Fork parents have been working around LPOSD to get hot meals reinstated.

Abbott said she contacted the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the agency responsible for the national nutrition program. She also called her elected officials, and even the White House. She was transferred to the office of first lady Michelle Obama, who had spearheaded school nutrition reforms during her husband’s first term.

“They were very concerned about this,” Abbott said.

Talk is cheap, however. Abbott said she received the same thick packet of “meaningless” information from them all.

Parents also volunteered their services to LPOSD to cook hot meals for students themselves. The district declined, citing school board food safety policies intended to limit risk due to potential allergic reactions, food intolerances, or medical issues such as diabetes, cross-contamination and other issues, according to LPOSD.

So starting this week, one parent began cooking hot meals for kids on her own.

Parent Angela Wolfe began cooking food on Tuesday at The Filling Station, a Clark Fork after-hours hangout for kids that boasts a licensed kitchen. Wolfe then offers the hot food from the street — and outside the authority of the school district. Since Tuesday she’s offered hot dogs, homemade macaroni and cheese, goulash, and baked chicken, she said. An average of 25 to 30 kids have taken her up on the food, Wolfe said.

Based on a citizen complaint, the Panhandle Health District inspected the ad hoc operation.

“We found no major risk, no violations,” Melanie Collet, Panhandle Health District public information officer, said. “We will continue to monitor the situation.”

Although Wolfe said she had received a few donations, she’s paid for most of the food herself.

“I’m taking everything out of my pocket right now,” she said.

The reason for the hot lunch program closure is a budgetary one: serving hot food at Clark Fork has become an issue of diminishing returns for the school district, Woodward said, one that has forced the school to make tough decisions.

According to Woodward, 47 Clark Fork students qualify for free or reduced-cost meals under the National School Breakfast or Lunch Program. The school is reimbursed for part or all of the costs of serving those hot lunches, depending on a family’s income level.

However, individual schools are not required to participate in those national programs, according to Woodward. If the district opts for non-participation at a school, it’s then not required to feed any student, as it would be if it were to opt in.

The district opted for non-participation at Clark Fork.

“We don’t have enough students eating to generate the kind of revenue that would reimburse us,” Woodward said. “The fewer kids that eat, the less money we have to pay for the overhead of running a commercial kitchen out there. It does require a certain threshold of student participation to keep it financially stable.”

In a letter sent to parents this week — including the new student feedback-based adjusted menu  — Woodward explained the reasons for the hot lunch program closure.

The district, he wrote, was projected to spend $56,000 — $395 per day — to feed the 22 students who actually participated in the hot lunch program. Revenue was $70 per day.

Only seven students were using the breakfast program when it was canceled.

The decision was made to close the Clark Fork school’s kitchen, and shut the program down in November. The compromise was brown bag lunches.

Today, despite no requirements forcing LPOSD to feed students, any student who asks for a bag lunch gets one, regardless of family income level, according to Woodward. The lunches are free.

“Anybody can grab one,” Woodward said.

That compromise will cut the food cost at Clark Fork in half, saving the LPOSD $25,000, according to the letter sent to parents.

Woodward also noted the school had previously experimented with bagels, cream cheese and orange juice as a replacement for the breakfast program. There was little interest, Woodward said.