School lunchrooms' grim tale: This is the crisis that Covid built

Children in LINC’s after-school program at Border Star Montessori enjoy Covid-safe snack time in May 2020.

The tales coming from area school districts are beginning to sound like a fractured children’s book.

These are the warehouses with empty shelves that lack the workers to load the trucks that sit with no drivers to deliver the food that goes to lunchrooms with freezers gone bare in schools that lack servers to ladle the meals that feed the kids who are trying to learn, if they can be focused and healthy and strong.

Yes, the strain on school nutrition programs stretches up “the whole delivery chain,” Hickman Mills Superintendent Yaw Obeng said at the September LINC Commission Meeting.

The North Kansas City School District, Superintendent Dan Clemens told the Commission, is just one of many districts that have had major food suppliers cancel their services because the suppliers can’t fulfill their contracts.

The crisis has districts scrambling after new resources and paring down menu options to meet the critical task of feeding students, he said.

“If you can’t find essential functions and provide for kids,” he said, “it’s hard to educate them.”

Grennan Sims, the director of food services for Hickman Mills, told The Kansas City Star that school districts are calling food distributors and calling on each other to cobble together meal plans.

Read more:

‘Makes my heart hurt’: Kansas City area schools struggle to feed kids amid shortages, The Kansas City Star

The worker shortages from school cafeterias to major food supplier warehouses is forcing hard choices on suppliers that are dealing both with retail contracts and the lower profit margin of school contracts, Sims told The Star.

“The sad part is now there are kids potentially suffering because of that,” she said. “We have a vulnerable population here in Hickman Mills. School is the only place where some of our kids get a hot meal.”

Many essential school services are straining under the worker shortages in addition to food service, superintendents told the Commission.

Administrators and staff have been called on to fill bus driver slots, do lunch duty and cover for paraprofessionals. After-school programs, like LINC, and childcare services are also in need of staff.

Put together, the shortages are denting the hard work of recovery as we emerge from the pandemic’s quarantines.

School systems throughout the nation are suffering the same dilemmas — trying to maintain nutrition standards while having to take whatever food sources they can to keep meals coming.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees the federal food program that provides free or reduced-price meals for low-income families, has been waiving many of its regulations and not penalizing districts for falling short of many guidelines during the shortages.

“We know that districts are doing everything they can to put healthy, nutritious food on the plate for kids,” USDA Undersecretary Stacy Dean told the New York Times. “We want to support that effort and reassure them that no one is going to get in trouble because of an unexpected difficulty.”

Schools know well Mazlow’s hierarchy of needs and its understanding that a child’s road to self-actualization — where real growth and learning happens — can’t begin if a child fears for basic needs: food, water and shelter.

“We want kids in school,” Sims said. “We want things to be normal. A huge part of that is feeding kids.”

By Joe Robertson/LINC Writer