Wake schools exploring another school meal price increase; board members looking for new solutions

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

Board members expressed frustration on Tuesday at the need to keep raising more revenue but remained positive about finding more ways to raise money.

"It is deeply troubling that we are considering asking families to pay more," Board Member Christina Gordon said, arguing the state should pay more toward school meals. Wake and many other school boards have advocated for free meals for all students.

State funding currently makes meals free for students who are already receiving a reduced price based on their income level. The federal government reimburses school districts for meals provided to the lowest-income families, who don't have to pay if they've opted into the program.

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. About a third of families participate in the lunch program, and about one in eight participate in the breakfast program.

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 district is trying to decreases its own costs by streamlining meal offerings and by maximizing space in its warehouses, where distributions don't come with case fees.

It's trying to increase revenues by encouraging more families to participate in the program and by selling more snacks, the district's child nutrition services Senior Director Tiffany Lawrence told the school board Tuesday.

School board members, following Lawrence's presentation about the price proposal and ongoing financial challenges in the child nutrition services department, brainstormed other solutions. Those could include cutting out higher-cost food items like the chicken sandwich, applying for more grants, and soliciting more community donations.

Lawrence said certain popular food items, like the chicken sandwich, are needed to keep people interested in being regular lunch customers. She's in the process of hiring a grant writer but cautioned that most grants are for equipment and not regular operations.

The district already accepts donations to its "Angel Fund" to provide meals to children whose accounts are too far in debt to afford an entree. That growing fund has coincided with increased debt among the district's students, debt so high that earlier this year the district asked the board to revoke its directive to never serve an entree-less "meal of shame" to indebted students. The board declined.

District leaders said Tuesday they plan to launch a donation page for a multitude of services beyond the Angel Fund, including special education and teacher and principal of the year programming.

"Given the value of public schools and all it's done for this country, the fact that any public school system has to take donations to operate is pathetic," Board Vice Chairman Sam Hershey said, urging government leaders, including the state, to spend more to fund education.

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 it for free breakfast and lunch for all students. Similarly, Charlotte-Mecklenburg provides free breakfast to all students, and its lunches cost $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.

Board members asked why Wake is charging more.

Lawrence said she didn't know the specifics of every district's situation but noted many school districts' child nutrition services departments have deficits.

"There is actually a large percentage of districts in the state that are operating in the negative," Lawrence said.

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.