Orange Trustees Add Food to the Conservative Menu

By LESLEY WRIGHT

May 5, 1996 12 AM PT

SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

Trustees in the Orange Unified School District, still reeling from their losing battle to cut off grants that fund health care and other nonacademic services in the schools, are opening a new front in their campaign to impose a more conservative agenda.

This time, a board majority is moving to privatize the food service operations in Orange Unified’s 37 school cafeterias to test the theory that a private firm can almost always do a better job than the public sector.

In contrast to the badly managed, debt-ridden nutrition services departments that most outside contractors are asked to salvage, the department that prepares and serves school lunches and breakfasts in this district consistently operates in the black and has been cited for excellence by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

But some trustees question both the quality of the food and the efficiency of the department’s operations. They point to the likely need for the district to spend $5 million on a new central kitchen as a financial incentive to get out of the food service business altogether. They voted 6 to 1 last week to invite bids from food providers.

Then there is the philosophical argument.

“I said when I was running for this office that I supported privatizing because I believe competition does breed excellence,” said Trustee Max Reissmueller, a strong advocate of conservative policies who pulled his own children out of Orange Unified to home-school them in 1994.

“I believe in most cases you can find a private company that can produce better results,” he said. “Who is this department in competition with?”

Some experts contend that such competition could result in poorer service for Orange Unified’s students. Any private firm that takes over the food service operations will find that the district’s employees cannot easily be replaced with less costly labor and might look to offer fewer food choices as a means of enhancing profits.

A change to a profit-oriented food provider could also mean less accountability to the students’ parents because the finances of private firms, unlike government agencies, are generally not subject to public scrutiny.

“Any time you have a district-run program, the parents have more control,” said Terry Pangborn, a parent in Orange Unified and a food service director in the Fullerton Joint Unified School District.

Pangborn conducted an informal survey of privately managed food programs and found that many offer just one choice for lunch and charge more money for fewer items.

“I don’t want to see Orange Unified spending more money to provide less choice, less quality and to have less control,” Pangborn said. “Any time you are dealing with private companies you are dealing with private enterprise, and it’s much harder to get information.”

The issue has already drawn protests from the same community activists who orchestrated the noisy defeat of last month’s move to ban all nonacademic activities in Orange Unified’s schools.

The district has been mired in controversy and tumultuous politics for decades. Over the years, trustees have faced recalls, labor strikes, allegations of bid-rigging, sexual harassment suits and fiscal problems that brought the district to the verge of bankruptcy.

The rightward tilt of the sitting board has given local activists little rest.

The conservative majority, made up of trustees Reissmueller, Maureen Aschoff, Martin Jacobson and Bill Lewis, has pushed for a number of contentious issues that have split the board on 4-3 votes.

They advocated transforming most of the district schools into charter schools to avoid the state’s Education Code, backed privatized transportation and most recently tried to ban any school from accepting grants not strictly linked to academics.

This recent policy initiative would have threatened programs such as free federal breakfasts for the needy, school-based health clinics, sports and the police-sponsored drug-prevention program called D.A.R.E.

After being faced with hundreds of outraged parents, educators and community leaders, they backed down, voting 5-2 to consider each grant on an individual basis. But the majority vowed to vote many of these grants down as they come up.

If a majority of Orange Unified’s trustees decide to contract out the school lunch service, they will be among the few districts in the state to do so. About 45 of the 1,000 public school districts in the state use private food companies to feed their students.

Any changes will be limited by law. Contracts may only be made for one year at a time. And the state’s Education Code protects cafeteria workers from firings when the district contracts with a private company to provide food.

So, one of the most typical cost-cutting tools--staff reductions--is not an option.

But the trustees who favor privatization said that a private sector firm could possibly save money on food and materials. A new central kitchen that is needed to handle enrollment growth is projected to cost about $5 million over the next few years, although some administrators believe the current program generates enough funds to offset that cost.

State officials said the restrictive laws were championed by employee unions, but that their motives were not entirely self-serving.

Service employees “think some of the contracting out has not resulted in the best service for kids,” said Duwayne Brooks, director of the child services division of the California Department of Education. “In some instances, the needs of the children take a back seat to profits. We do caution them to look beyond the dollar. . . . Cheaper is not always better.”

Food service companies are scheduled to soon receive requests for bids asking if they can feed better food to the district’s 27,000 students more efficiently than the in-house program. At least two large food service companies have already started looking at the district’s program.

What they will find is a department that is innovative, progressive and profitable, according to Sue McCann, a parent in the district who recently studied Orange Unified’s kitchens while researching data for her dissertation on the privatization of food services.

Her study found that school districts generally tend to have better results when they run their own programs, and that those who turn to private companies risk losing revenue. “I found that self-operators do better, particularly in nutrition services,” McCann said.

In the case of Orange Unified, McCann said, “I don’t think [the trustees] have given their own program a chance to succeed. It’s not fiscally responsible. Orange Unified’s department generates a very healthy profit every year that is redirected into their own program. . . . I don’t think we need to experiment in this area. I don’t think we have the money to spare.”

McCann, who ran unsuccessfully for a seat on the school board last year, said the motivations behind the current effort to privatize the food service department must be in part political, because she can find no practical reason to overturn a successful program in favor of an unknown private vendor.

“I don’t know why they’re doing it,” she said. “Maybe they’re getting lobbied, or privatization is on the Republican agenda.”

The district’s food program was lauded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1990 as having “one of the outstanding lunch programs in California and the western region.” Last fall, the USDA cited the department’s staffers for their “continuous effort to relieve hunger among needy children in the Orange Unified School District with the summer food program.”

The district’s trustees agree that the program is good and certainly adequate. But the majority have made firm commitments to privatization efforts while campaigning. They said the request for bids is simply a means of judging how their program compares to outside competition.

“I think we need to open the doors a little bit and allow private industry to bid on our programs,” said Trustee Maureen Aschoff, whose reelection bid last year was endorsed by Assemblyman Mickey Conroy (R-Orange), the Education Alliance and other conservative groups. “I think that process is healthy for our public entities. Conducting an open bid process where private companies can compete is a concept I believe in.”

Aschoff has previously stated that reforming the school system is part of “the Republican agenda,” and the board’s conservative majority has won endorsements and financial contributions from the right wing of the local GOP.

The educational issues Aschoff referred to call for a back-to-basics vision that eliminates from the schools so-called “welfare” and family functions, such as medical and psychological care, and allows private enterprise to play a larger role.

“I pride myself on not being stagnant,” Reissmueller said. “I believe it’s my duty to try to improve the public education system. . . . We can certainly reject all the bids. But to not look at all the information, that’s like burying your head in the sand.”

Reissmueller and the others also contend that the “profit” the food department generates is a fallacy, since law forbids them to spend the money on anything but the food department. “It’s all a numbers game, anyway,” he said.

But Reissmueller conceded that he might have to abstain on any vote involving Marriott Food Services because his brother-in-law was recently hired by the corporation.

Trustee James Fearns consistently opposes the conservative majority on the board. He said he believes the board is considering privatization only because groups considered to be the Christian Right would approve. “Privatization, in and of itself, is part of the total outline of the right wing,” he said.

“We are wasting the administrators’ time and energy to go through the background and research” necessary to solicit the bids, he said. “I feel like we are running down a dark alley and don’t know what’s in front of us.”

Those who have studied the issue can match nearly every successful case with a horror story.

Administrators in the Compton Unified School District still have nightmares about their fiasco with private food management companies.

The district hired two companies in 1987 to try to bring their food services budget under control. Three years later they were left with a deficit of more than $2 million.

Officials finally withheld payments from the companies, and Marriott School Services Inc. and National Business Services Inc. took the district to court in 1994 to force them to pay.

The district has since returned to running its own program. Officials with the companies did not return calls for comment.

On the other hand, administrators with the Saddleback Valley Unified School District said they have been very pleased with the services of Marriott during the nine years the company has run their lunch program.

“If you honestly handle the contracts the right way and have choices for the kids and reasonable costs for products, it can be a good way to do things,” said Bob Cornelius, Saddleback’s assistant superintendent for business services.

Orange Unified trustees have cautioned alarmed parents that they are merely researching the issue at this point and that they plan to proceed carefully.

“The board will have to be very careful and go very slowly,” said Trustee Jacobson, adding that he is concerned because the community tends to react so strongly to anything the board proposes. “We need to hear from parents and employees. We need to include everyone in this as much as possible.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Orange Trustees

Orange Unified School District trustees, who lost a battle to eliminate school-based health services, now want to take the district’s nutrition services private. A look at the trustees:

Maureen Aschoff

Age: 50

Occupation: Librarian, University Park branch in Irvine

Elected: 1991; reelected in 1995

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James Fearns

Age: 65

Occupation: Retired Orange County probation officer

Elected: 1993

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Martin Jacobson

Age: 43