Wake schools exploring another school meal price increase

The Wake school system is asking the school board to consider raising meal prices for the fifth year in a row.

The district hopes a $0.25 per meal price increase will yield more than half a million dollars and help boost the district's child nutrition services department's savings. The district has had the same hope each year for years now, ultimately struggling to keep its savings at the required two-month level.

Each meal price increase brings in new revenue while costs continue to go up.

Wake's costs are increasing for several reasons, driven by local decision-making and mostly outside forces.

Namely, the school board has voted multiple times to increase wages for child nutrition services workers --- and many other workers --- after struggling mightily to employ them when schools reopened for daily learning in 2021 during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The district is also contending with some higher food costs, higher distribution fees and rising employee benefits. For example, the cost of some chicken products has more than doubled in the past decade. The district is paying about $100,000 more in distribution fees than a decade ago.

The district would raise about $555,000 from the lunch price increase and nearly $100,000 from the breakfast price increase, if the same number of students continue to buy meals. Participation usually drops when prices increase.

Child nutrition services departments are typically set up like independent restaurants operating in schools. They pay for their costs through the revenue they raise. That revenue largely comes from federal reimbursements for free and discounted meals and from families purchasing school meals for their students. Extra funding raised for them can only be used to lower meal prices for families.

The school board is set to hear a presentation from the district on Tuesday about the price proposal and ongoing financial challenges in the child nutrition services department.

The Wake County Public School System's meal prices are higher than those of its neighbors and other large school systems. It charges $2.25 for an elementary breakfast, $2.50 for a middle or high school breakfast, $3.75 for an elementary school lunch and $4 for a middle and high school lunch.

Durham's share of impoverished students qualifies them for free breakfast and lunch for all students. Similarly, Charlotte-Mecklenburg provides free breakfast to all students, and its lunches costs $1 less than Wake's.

Guilford, Orange, Chapel Hill-Carrboro and Winston-Salem/Forsyth County all charge between $0.60 and $1 less for lunch than Wake.

At the same time, Wake is paying its workers more than most other school districts,, thanks to a series of votes from the school board since the pandemic.

In 2021, the wages for most nonsupervisory child nutrition services workers started at $11.58 per hour and topped out at $16.37 per hour in Wake. Today, wages for those same workers start at $17.75 per hour and top out at $25.75 per hour.

Those wages are relatively high, though not the highest wages in the state. Charlotte-Mecklenburg pays at least $20.10 per hour to cafeteria workers and Chapel Hill-Carrboro pays at least $17.84. Durham, Orange and Guilford pay less.

Wake's meal prices were relatively stable and rarely rose from the late 1990s until the mid-2010s, even trailing the prices of nearby and other large school districts, according to records from past school board meetings. In 2016, they began rising almost every year; the only exceptions were the 2020-21 and 2021-22 school years, when the federal government provided all meals for free as part of temporary Covid-19 pandemic assistance.

In 2016, an elementary school breakfast cost $1.25, a middle and high school breakfast cost $1.50, an elementary school lunch cost $2 and a middle and high school lunch cost $2.25. Since then, the meal prices have risen by 50% to 67%.

Most of that increase has been in just the paw few years.

A family of two children who eat lunch at school every day is paying about $350 more per year to feed their children at school than they were before the pandemic.

That family would pay $88.50 more next year, in a 177-day school year, with a $0.25 per meal price increase.

National nutrition and economic groups typically contend that school meals are more nutritious and cheaper in the end for families than making a cold lunch for their child to take to school.

That depends on the price of the school meal to begin with.

A 2020 report published in the School Nutrition Association's journal found that basic packed lunches are cheaper than a school meal but nutritionally far apart. The vast majority of home-packed lunches contain significant added sugar, researchers noted. Packed lunches are also only cheaper if they are homemade, not if they are a meal kit purchased at a store, researchers found.

In 2025, consulting company Deloitte found that food prices had risen to the point where most bagged lunches were far more expensive than school meals. The average school meal in 2025 was $3, the company found.