Plenty of questions for school food service plans

Medford School District Administrator Pat Sullivan wants to hire an outside contractor to run the school district's meal program.
With a participation rate hovering around 90 percent of students getting healthy, quality meals the Medford school lunch program is by most measures a success. On the balance books, however, the program has run into the same increases in food costs which have ridden on the backs of increased fuel and transportation expenses. Last year, the food service at the schools was subsidized by the school’s fund balance to the tune of $20,000. This translates to a shortfall of about $.05 a meal for the 366,000 meals served at the schools.
The hope, says Sullivan, is that by hiring a company – like the one he worked with at Northland Pines School District – the school would benefit from the company's larger buying power and see cost savings. At last week's school board meeting, Sullivan first brought up the idea of hiring an outside contractor and in February vendors will come to the school board to make sales pitches.
On its face, the idea has some merit. Whether you deal with sewer plants or school lunches, economies of scale exist and can save significant sums of money. However, like the person who buys their groceries at the wholesale club, you have to pay attention to the unit cost and if you will ever use the amount to justify the expense.
There are plenty of questions that school board members need to ask before seeking to solve a problem which may or may not exist. Does Medford need to hire an outside contractor to take advantage of having larger buying power or can the district work with other schools in the county similar to the food service consortium the Colby and Abbotsford districts to the south already use?
If the school contracts out the food service, what will happen to the district employees working there now, will they become employees of whatever food service company is hired? Will they retain their wages and benefits? To whom will they answer?
Will local caterers or food service companies be given an opportunity to bid or will the specification be tailor-made to limit the prospective field of vendors to a small handful?
Who will have control over use of the kitchens? Will the Tavern League Light-a-light dinner be able to be held at the school, how about the annual Boy Scout Pancake supper?
Since the other way to save money on food purchases is to purchase lower food quality, what types of quality guarantees will there be? Will we begin to see more potato and pasta dishes on the lunch buffets in place of meats and vegetables? Or will they cater solely to the chips and Twinkie appetites of students?
What about the trend in many state schools to utilize locally grown or purchased produce. One of the state's largest produce auctions is located just south of Medford in Withee, does the district take advantage of this resource. What about meal price? Should we be charging students or the adults who eat school lunches more? At $2.10 for a high school lunch or $3.15 for an adult, lunch, the meal prices are hard to beat.
Has the school district looked at maximizing staff by centralizing the cooking operations into one building? What other cost saving measures have been or could be done?
Privatization of secondary government services makes sense because often the private sector can do as good a job for less money than a government agency can allowing the government agency to focus on fulfilling its primary purpose. In this case providing quality education to students is the primary function of the schools, serving meals is a secondary function. However, there are plenty of questions that need to be asked and discussed by the school district before jumping into this proposal.
Before school board members make this decision, they need to do their homework and ask districts where it has been successful what they have done and also talk to those districts which went with a contractor and regretted later and find out what their issues were.
Board members need to ask questions and get answers before they decide if they need to privatize the school food service program.