Coeur d'Alene School District tackles budget challenge by changing school lunches

COEUR D'ALENE, Idaho - In an effort to cut costs, the Coeur d'Alene School District is using a third-party company to provide lunches to students in the upcoming school year.

The district said offering free school lunches to every student during the pandemic created problems with the nutrition services budget.

According to the district, the cost of having a third-party company handle school lunches would take them from a deficit of around $900,000 a year to a surplus of over $100,000.

The district said it's been getting consistent complaints over the years about the quality of school lunches.

"We've heard from a lot of our students over the years about this one, just poor food quality. Not meals they're excited about," said Coeur d'Alene Public Schools deputy superintendent of operations Seth Deniston. "As a result of that, we've had less and less kids eating school lunch."

The district also faces a $6 million deficit for this school year. Right now, it is looking at every possible opportunity to close the gap.

A new partnership between the district and Arizona-based company Southwest Foodservice Excellence will allow the school menu to expand from a couple thousand different items to over 50,000 options.

"It will be much more variety. A lot of different items that hopefully our students will enjoy and will be purchasing," Deniston said.

SFE will follow the same federal guidelines the district was working with before, meaning families can expect the same nutritional value in their school lunch.

"We had a few students on the panel," said Deniston. "Their ability to give student feedback and talk to them about the food that they like and what they want to eat was key to us."

The district said many of the nutritional services staff have decided to work with SFE for the upcoming school year, though benefits won't be the same as the school district's.

"The biggest (difference) really is in retirement packages because in the State of Idaho we have a public pension plan," Deniston explained. "SFE does not, they have a 401k instead."

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