I have spoken about this in other threads but part of the problem with school lunches is administrative rot. The lunch ladies are in trouble, my friends.
One problem is the divide between classified employees (lunch ladies, noontime aides, bus drivers, crossing guards, etcetera) and office staff (principals, admin, and district offices employees). Classified employees are considered the lowest of the low in a school district. The peasants. They don’t have fancy HR degrees and they aren’t eDuCaToRs, so who gives a fuck about them? Nobody, that’s who.
What does that look like? Well for one, each school site generally will have only one full-time kitchen employee, maybe 1 or 2 assistants who will get 4-6 hour shifts and then a bunch of 2-hour shift employees for the lunch rush. Almost nobody wants to work only 2 hours a day, so those jobs become the waiting room positions for people who got their foot in the door with the district while they apply around for higher hour job postings. This creates a high turnover problem which requires the head lunch lady and her assistant(s) to be perpetually training someone new. Almost every site has constant open positions for 2-hours employees and a revolving door of subs. It used to be that stay at home moms would work in the kitchen since they would be guaranteed to be back home when their kids’ schools let out. But the job is so demanding, so thankless, and pays so little that most of the moms are gone now.
The district office is staffed with the worst of the worst HR assholes whose main goal is to dispense the bare minimum in funds to the school sites and hoard the rest for “staff development” weekends to fancy hotels. They actively hate their own employees. In my nearest school district, the nutrition department even refuses to allow the head lunch ladies to be referred to as “managers” because fuck them, even tho it is their job to handle their employees, order all the food, handle all the cash deposits, y’know MANAGE. The district staff spends its time to dodge phone calls, send condescending emails, and generally do their best to work the bare minimum while extracting the maximum possible from their school districts.
Speaking of the food, it’s got to be shelf-stable or at least resistant to spoilage by necessity. The food prep is primarily accomplished by the 1-3 higher hour lunch ladies. The 2-hour jobbers are responsible for running registers, helping with set up and takedown of the cafeteria itself, and some cleaning if there is time. So it’s up to 1-3 employees to arrive at the kitchen and work like madwomen to cook for 1000+ students every day. There aren’t enough hours or manpower for them to be preparing fresh food every single day. They are required by the district to serve a certain variety of foods, which much be purchased from certain vendors, and all of it has to avoid spoilage. The schools aren’t providing weekend meals or running on holidays, so the food has to be precisely ordered in quantities meant to run out before the week ends. But God help the lunch ladies if they ever run out one second too soon.
Students who take a school lunch are required to take a COMPLETE lunch, which they hate because they are kids, so the lunch ladies have to prepare all the food items for each 1000 lunches regardless of whether the students will actually eat them. I’m speaking from personal experience when I say there is a certain kind of existential despair that comes from portioning and packaging something like 1000 soggy plain jicama sticks in little ziploc sacks when you KNOW every single one is going to end up in the trash anyway because the kids only came through the line for their little juice carton but were forced to also take a mystery meat sandwich and a serving of weird and unfamiliar vegetables. It’s not lunch, it’s “lunch theater” meant to performatively demonstrate to parents that their children were offered a complete, nutritious meal with a variety of options. Everyone involved knows that the kids aren’t eating it.
Lunch itself is getting shorter. The admin would probably cancel it altogether if they could get away with it. The lunch ladies have about 15-20 minutes to get all those kids through the lines because then they have to have time to sit down and eat before the bell rings. The kids have to punch in their numbers, which they never remember, and also argue with the lunch ladies about taking a full lunch they didn’t want. If there is ANY delay like a school assembly or pep rally, the head lunch lady will sit down at her computer in the afternoon with an email inbox filled with snippy parent complaints that their little darlings didn’t have enough time to eat their soggy jicama.
Lunch ladies worked through covid times, by the way. Everyone else in the school districts sat on their asses at home for 2 years but the lunch ladies still came to work to prepare sack lunches that parents could come pick up free of charge. The illegal immigrant students in my area still came to school and sat in computer labs to do their ESL homework and they were all fed even though their families contribute nothing to our society.
It’s a job done primarily by women who have or had kids go through that school district. It’s often a labor of love. They WANT to feed the kids food they will eat and enjoy because that is fulfilling and rewarding women’s work. They are shat on by almost everyone, but it’s a department that could flourish again. Guillotine every single district employee, give all the liberated funds to each school site kitchen MANAGER, and allow them to use it to hire more full-time staff and order fresher and better quality ingredients and we could fix the nutrition department in every school in America.
