Two examples of lunches served to Madison area elementary school students so far this year. Parents and staff have complained about the low quality of the food, which administrators say was due to employee shortages.
Two examples of lunches served to Madison area elementary school students so far this year. Parents and staff have complained about the low quality of the food, which administrators say was due to employee shortages.
Teachers and parents are alarmed at the quality of school lunches served around the Madison Metropolitan School District to begin the 2022-23 school year.
District officials blame staffing shortages and supply chain demands for the issues that have been raised, which mirror those that plagued the district at times last school year.
“While we too want a very robust menu, we also recognize that we have some staffing shortages that have severely impacted us,” MMSD associate superintendent of operations Cedric Hodo told the School Board Monday. “For us to get to where you want to go, we have to fix this staffing issue.”
The district’s jobs website lists 11 food service worker positions under “current openings,” including one at Hawthorne Elementary School posted Sept. 12, one at Wright Middle School and another at Schenk/Whitehorse, both posted Sept. 8.
“MMSD continues to actively recruit food service workers,” MMSD spokesperson Tim LeMonds wrote in an email statement Tuesday. “We anticipate being able to expand our menu options to include staff-prepared items over the next week as newly hired staff complete their required food preparation training. In addition, we are working with our food supplier to identify more choices we can offer our students.”
Allison Martinson, whose family is new to MMSD with a daughter in first grade at Franklin Elementary School, wrote in an email that she recently sent her daughter to school without a lunch “so she could experience ‘pizza day’ with her classmates,” as the schedule outlined.
Instead, Martinson wrote, students received melted yogurt, a cheese stick, apple slices and Cheez-Its.
“While my family is capable of providing lunch from home, I am concerned about the children who are not so lucky,” Martinson wrote. “My kid came home starving from school.”
She added she was disappointed that she hadn’t received communication from the school’s principal or the district about supply chain issues or a lack of adequate food.
One teacher shared a similar experience on Facebook, showing the schedule offering an “Anytimer Pizza Kit” — a Lunchable-style cold item — but the actual lunch featured a hard boiled egg, cheese stick, cookie, pears and dragon punch juice for the vegetable.
That teacher, who asked to remain anonymous, described lunches this year as “awful.”
“I know our food service person (at my building) is doing her best, but I'm supplementing lunches with food from our food pantry and my own things nearly every day,” she told the Cap Times.
She said that many kids “aren’t eating anything because they don’t eat what’s served, and their parents didn’t know” what would be for lunch that day because it was wrong on the online menu. Kids who haven’t eaten enough, she added, have trouble learning.
“Kids tell me throughout the day that they are hungry,” she said. “Some kids run out of energy and are just dragging through the day. Some are very sensitive to the high sugar content on some days and are really amped up for a short time.”
Kaziah Anderson, who helped found the Moms on a Mission group that hands out snacks to East High School students during lunch, said she’s noticed students seemingly hungrier than they were last year.
“We've definitely had more students coming to get snacks this year than they did last year, whether that's just that they know that we're there or that there's no options for them inside,” Anderson said.
LeMonds said the district is “working to provide our scholars with needed nutrition and enjoyable food.”
“Although the meals we have provided meet nutritional standards, we also recognize the importance of producing satisfying meals which meet the expectations of our community,” he wrote. “Our district is putting every effort into addressing this challenge, as we know satisfying, healthy meals are a crucial component of the school day.”
The district’s website lists this week’s lunches featuring an “Anytimer Pizza Kit” on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, with an “Anytimer Turkey & Cheese Snack Lunch Kit” on Tuesday and Thursday. The vegetarian lunches include the yogurt and hard boiled egg meals that have been served previously.
A district Facebook post searching for employees to help the district on Monday received comments outlining other challenges, as well, as did a post from state Sen. Melissa Agard, who has children who attend school in the district.
Agard reported in her Monday post her seventh grade student “has been fed pizza every day of this school year,” and parents in the comments offered similar concerns about the quality.
The starting hourly wage for food service workers in the district ranges from $16.44 for food service floaters and food service workers to $20.61 for lead cooks and kitchen coordinators.
The $16.44 rate is tied for the lowest starting wage in the district. Some of the positions do not work enough hours to qualify for benefits.
While the board and district leaders have discussed increasing hourly wages recently, the only changes so far have been for educational assistants. A memo to the School Board from administrators in August showed that increasing the food service salary schedule by $2 per hour would cost $317,290, increasing it by $3.50 an hour would cost $552,421 and increasing it by $5 an hour would cost $789,092.
The board is expected to continue its discussion of hourly wage increases next week. Jennifer Gaddis, a UW-Madison associate professor and expert on school food programs, suggested increasing pay is one place parents and staff disappointed with the food options so far should focus their energy.
“There’s not a whole lot that you’re going to see improve in terms of a reduction in prepackaged foods or greater freshness or variety unless MMSD can attract and retain the labor to prepare those kinds of meals,” Gaddis said. “There are things that the district could be doing if they had a fully staffed workforce, and I think that if they were able to invest and build out higher-quality jobs, that would really translate pretty directly into improved meals for kids.”
The teacher who asked to remain anonymous suggested that the district’s leadership created the problem in passing a budget that offered food service staff lower pay than they could make at Culver’s, among other places, along with other hourly workers.
“If the main goal of the district is the health, safety and education of our students, then their budgetary priorities should reflect that: food service/reliable vendors equals health; SEAs, special ed staff, school psych/counselors/support and mental health professionals equals safety; and properly trained, paid, supplied, and supported teachers equals education,” she said.
Beyond the short-term consequences of children not getting enough to eat, poor lunches could further damage the district’s food service program if more parents decide to send lunch from home instead.
Gaddis explained that the more families that participate in a school lunch program, the more efficiently that program can use its dollars.
“That basically frees up more money to be allocating toward higher quality ingredients or toward compensating workers better because you just have a lot more revenue to spread across the number of people that you’re employing,” Gaddis said.
Anderson said the district has to meet the “basic necessity” of properly feeding students who need to eat at school.
“That's a pretty basic need that we should be able to meet as a society, as a community, as a school district,” she said. “If we don’t feed these kids, there’s no way they’re going to be able to focus on learning.”
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