The School Committee has raised the price of school lunches to comply with a federal mandate to achieve parity with the federal subsidy.
WEST SPRINGFIELD – The price of lunch in the city’s public schools will go up by 25 cents this fall as part of an effort by the School Department to comply with a federal mandate.
The School Committee voted 6-1 last week to increase the price of lunches for elementary school students from $1.75 to $2 and for junior and senior high school students from $2 to $2.25.
School Department business manager Carey G. Sheehan said Monday that the move is to comply with a section of the federal Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 that requires schools to bring the price of regularly priced lunches up to the level of what the federal government pays districts to cover free lunches. That figure is currently at $2.46 meal. Having lunches priced below that level means the reduced price lunches are subsidizing the regularly priced meals, according to Sheehan.
Dario F. Nardi, the School Department’s food service director, said the federal government wants to bring the school lunch prices up to the level of its subsidy over the next five years.
“They want equality in school lunch pricing,” Nardi said, adding that most other public school systems in the area are also raising the prices of their lunches.
School Committee Vice Chairman Daniel Sullivan made the motion to increase the price of lunches by 25 cents.
Mayor Edward J. Gibson, who chairs the School Committee, was one of the members who voted in favor of the price increase.
“It was time to go up to recapture some of the costs,” Gibson said Tuesday.
The mayor said it costs the School Department as much as $4 to $4.25 to prepare a lunch and that the extra money can go toward equipment, programs and salaries.
Nardi said that of the city’s approximately 4,000 public school students, about 75 percent are served school lunches. About 48 percent of the students are eligible for free or reduced price lunches.
The food service director said five years ago when he first started his job that figure was 33 percent. It costs about $1.5 million annually to run the school lunch program, which gets about $1.2 million a year in state and federal subsidies.