While many school districts across the country are raising the prices of student lunches, Niagara Falls is keeping its lunches at $1.50 — at the cost of some cafeteria workers’ benefits.
Faced with a budget shortfall of $226,000, the Niagara Falls City School District is restructuring its food services program, cutting down five-hour positions to three hours, affecting about a dozen of the program’s 82 workers.
“Holding the line is getting harder and harder,” said Joseph Giarrizzo, director of finance. “Both the cost of the food itself as well as personnel costs are up. We’re doing the best to hold down the impact on both those items to run an efficient food service program.”
The switch, effective Sept. 22, should not result in any lay-offs, but those no longer clocking 20 hours of work weekly will be losing some benefits entitled to part-time employees.
While many districts like Niagara-Wheatfield, the City of Tonawanda and Lockport have raised lunch prices for the year in response to swelling costs of fuel, flour, corn and wheat, it was increasing health insurance costs that forced the Falls district to scale back. The district increased lunch prices by 10 cents three years ago, but stronger action was needed this time, said Superintendent Carmen Granto.
Granto said families can’t afford paying more for lunches — but the prices probably couldn’t be increased enough to make up the deficit in the food services budget.
“Health fees rose just way out of proportion too fast,” Granto said. “We probably could’ve absorbed the commodity costs.”
Increasing health insurance rates are not a new problem, though — it was the culprit behind some large expenditure increases from last year to this year in many local school district instructional budgets. In the Falls, health insurance spending was expected to rise by $2.4 million for this year.
Food service workers were informed of the cutback Wednesday, Granto said.
“We were very frank with them — they do an excellent job but the cost of personnel just out striped our ability to main it,” he said.
Some current food service employees in the Falls are expected to retire and more part-time workers should be hired over the next couple of weeks, Granto said.
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