School Lunches Getting Cold--the Students Aren’t Buying

When it comes to eating, David Chung, 17, offers one simple reason why he prefers not to eat the food served at the Santa Monica High School cafeteria.

“I don’t like it,” he said recently between bites of a Whopper. “Half the time they don’t serve what you want.”

What Chung and many of his fellow students want is fast food--hamburgers and fries, pizza or fried chicken.

“Most of all we want to get away from school, to be off campus near the beach in a better environment,” said Ryan Moos, 16, who sat eating with Chung on a street curb in the shade just off campus.

Their views are shared by many students at Santa Monica High and elsewhere. School officials are concerned because lunch programs, despite efforts to increase participation by offering popular food items, are not competing. And the loss of revenue is hurting.

In the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District, where fewer than a fourth of the district’s 9,600 students eat lunches prepared in the schools each day, officials estimate that the cafeteria service will lose about $700,000 by the end of the school year. Lack of student participation is cited as the reason.

“The food is excellent,” said Rory Livingston, business services administrator. “What we are dealing with is basically a small operation that is designed to feed a horrendous number of people in a short period of time. It is hard for us to compete. We don’t have the marketing budgets and our labor costs are greater (than fast food restaurants). Our campus is wide open so students who don’t want to wait in our lines go off campus.”

Nowhere in the district is the situation worse than on the secondary school level where participation in the lunch program is “extremely low,” said Sharon Hoaglund, district fiscal services administrator.

For example, she said, at Santa Monica High School, where an open campus policy allows students to leave school for lunch, a recent survey showed that about 6% (or 153 students) out of a total enrollment of 2,600 buy school lunches each day. At Adams, Lincoln and Malibu Park junior high schools, only 12% of the 2,420 students purchase the daily lunches in the cafeteria. Roughly half of the students at the district’s nine elementary schools participate in the school lunch program.

Forced to Subsidize

Rising deficits have caught officials in Santa Monica by surprise. And school officials are faced with the task of having to subsidize meals with dollars that were slated for education.

“It’s like Chrysler going to the federal government for help, but we can’t afford it,” said school board member Connie Jenkins.

On Monday, Livingston told the board that the district could save $60,000 if it approved a series of changes including a 25-cent price increase per lunch, the layoff of six workers and a reduction of 16 hours in the daily operation of the cafeteria staff. The district has 42 cafeteria workers.

The board tabled the recommendations after hearing complaints from cafeteria workers that they were being made to feel responsible for the deficit and bear the brunt of a cutback. Not satisfied with the proposals, the board asked the district staff to find ways of making cafeteria meals more appealing.

Opposition to Price Hike

Ed Dodd, the Santa Monica-Malibu district’s food services director, said he disagreed with his manager’s proposal. He said an increase in the price of lunches could result in a 40% drop in student participation in the meals program.

He said the district could save $120,000 if it returned to a system of preparing all meals in a centralized kitchen. Two years ago the district abandoned a program of preparing all students meals from a centralized kitchen on the high school campus and signed an agreement with Preferred Meals Systems Inc. of Chicago to provide prepackaged meals for elementary school students.

Supt. George Caldwell described the recommendations as a “quick fix” until long-range solutions can be developed. But school board member Dianne Berman said the board was looking for “more creative solutions.”

School board member Robert Holbrook said the district should “either drop the cafeteria or go to a radical departure and provide the food and services the kids are willing to pay for. (If) fast food is what the kids want, well then maybe fast food is what we should give them.

“I would ask a McDonald’s franchise to come in (and run the cafeteria). I would find out if a franchise would be interested. You reach a point of coming down to the bottom line. If you don’t provide the services that the students want, then you have to get out of the business.”

Holbrook’s suggestion would conflict with goals set by the district’s food advisory committee, which is trying to eliminate junk food from cafeteria menus. Recently the committee recommended and received board approval to eliminate High-C soft drinks from student vending machines. However, High-C soft drinks were responsible for $42,000 in sales from September to December.

“This puts us in a bind,” school board member Peggy Lyons said. “For those like myself who believe that the school district should serve high quality food, the choice is not whether to put a McDonald’s hamburger on the menu, but whether to serve food altogether.”

Other Districts’ Problems

Santa Monica is not the only district faced with the dilemma of how to increase participation in its lunch program. In the Culver City Unified School District, where officials are considering prohibiting students from leaving campus for lunch, Supt. Curtis Rethmeyer described the lunch program as barely at the “break even” level.

The Beverly Hills Unified School District cut its cafeteria losses by signing a contract with a private caterer of frozen prepackaged meals. The company had planned to make a profit, but after a year of operation it has lost about $100,000, Beverly Hills Assistant Supt. John Scoggin said. The company is not expected to seek renewal of its contract next year, he said.