Meal prices increasing at Wake County schools for fifth straight year

The price of a school meal is going up for the fifth straight school year in Wake County.

The school board voted 7-0 Wednesday to raise the price of breakfast and lunch by $0.25 each next school year. Board Members Chris Heagarty and Toshiba Rice were absent from Wednesday's meeting.

Wednesday's vote raises the price of breakfast to $2.25 at elementary schools and $2.50 at middle and high schools. It also raises the price of lunch to $4 for elementary schools and $4.25 for middle and high schools.

The board also voted to create a task force to work on limiting future cost increases. That came after a suggestion during public comment, before the vote, from Jeanette Hill, an assistant principal at Apex High School.

"We should be able to come up with more solutions that don't strain families," Hill said, offering to serve on the task force. Hill has advocated for free school meals for all students, arguing that they improve student attendance, behavior and performance and are often more nutritious than the food students bring from home.

The latest meal price increase is the result of rising food, delivery and employee benefit costs, coinciding with rising wages required by both state and local leadership in the past five years.

Advocates worry about the impact the increase will have on struggling families that don't qualify for free or reduced lunches. 

"That means an increase of 25 cents a day for lunch and 25 cents for breakfast may not mean a lot, but for families who are just over that edge, it's going to be a huge cost burden," Marianne Weant with the NC Alliance for Health said. 

Wake County also has relatively few students participating in the meal program, compared to other districts nationally, so it hasn't been able to raise additional revenue by attracting new customers. Researchers in recent years have estimated about 60% to 70% of students nationally eat a school-provided meal. In Wake County, where fewer students are eligible for free or reduced-price meals, it's just 32%.

Wake is trying to avoid debt. The district's child nutrition services Senior Director Tiffany Lawrence said earlier this month that she knows other school districts' departments are struggling with debt.

Many nearby school districts and other similarly large school districts in North Carolina charge less for meals than Wake.

Taxpayer funds generally don't directly pay for school nutrition departments.

When the General Assembly or the school board vote to raise cafeteria worker wages, for example, they aren't voting to shift a portion of tax dollars over to those workers, because tax dollars don't directly fund those workers.

The sale of meals, and any state or federal reimbursements for those meals, funds the school cafeteria. That means any increase in the cost of operation --- whether prompted by state, local or contractor decisions --- must be covered by selling and serving more meals or raising the cost to the student.

"The cost of school meals is fully borne by child nutrition programs: Every dollar that goes to labor. Every dollar that goes to benefits. Every dollar that's spent on food," Weant said. "It's time to start asking the question of is that really a fair system?"

Both the General Assembly and the Wake school board have raised wages for nutrition services staff in recent years, with lawmakers raising minimum pay to $15 per hour and the school board going beyond that.

Since 2021, wages for most nonsupervisory nutrition workers rose from $11.58 per hour to start to $17.75 per hour to start. Maximum pay rose from $16.37 per hour to $25.75 per hour.

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 federal funds covered the cost of making all meals free,  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 past few years.

A family wth two children who eat lunch at school every day is paying about $350 more per year for those meals 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.

The school board met Wednesday after it moved its typical third-Tuesday-of-the-month meeting this week because high school graduations conclude Tuesday.