WAUSAU − Students who eat breakfast and lunch in the Wausau School District will see the cost of those meals increase next year.
The cost increase was announced during a May 20 meeting of the district’s Education/Operations Committee. The price increases include a 25-cent hike on elementary school and staff/visitor breakfasts, a 10-cent increase for middle school breakfast and high school breakfast and lunch, and a 5-cent increase for elementary and middle school lunch.
Breakfasts will cost $1.75 for elementary, $1.85 for middle school and $2 for high school students next year, and lunch will cost $2.90, $3 and $3.20, respectively. Staff and visitors will pay $2.75 for breakfast, a 25-cent increase over last year, and $4.75 for lunch, which stayed the same.
Check out our best photos: Wausau East High School Graduation 2024
Check out our best photos: Wausau West High School Graduation 2024
Karen Fochs, the district’s nutrition services director, said the increases were needed to respond to increased costs of food, kitchen supplies and labor.
The increase comes only weeks after Yauo Yang, a Schofield pastor and parent of six Wausau School District students, raised over $26,000 via a GoFundMe campaign to pay student meal debt at both the Wausau School District and D.C. Everest Area School District. When Yang started the fundraiser in mid-April, the Wausau School District lunch debt balance was at $10,925.
Fochs said a portion of the debt comes from students who are eligible for National School Lunch Program, the federal free or reduced-cost lunch program, but whose parents do not fill out the paperwork.
Failure to fill out paperwork is one symptom of a wider issue referred to as “administrative burden” by University of Wisconsin-Madison affiliated researchers. The term refers to costs individuals experience when accessing public programs that are not all measured in dollars.
A 2022 White House memo on reducing administrative burden breaks administrative burden into categories like the time and energy to learn about a program, the stress or discomfort of applying, and additional time and money cost to follow through with the program and deal with the vendors who distribute the program.
“We start with the students who are receiving free meals right now,” Fochs said during the meeting, describing how the GoFundMe dollars were distributed. “They accumulate balances. Many of them haven’t been free since the beginning. A lot of them struggled or didn’t fill out the application. That’s the hardest part. That’s where we struggle the most with a lot of the families. They just don’t want to fill out the application, or they forget to fill out the application or there is numerous reasons.”
Fochs told committee members another common time students gain lunch debt is during a two-night trip to the school forest, which includes two dinners and two snacks on top of breakfast and lunch costs, which adds up, particularly for families with multiple children.
Erik Pfantz covers local government and education in central Wisconsin for USA-TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin and values his background as a rural Wisconsinite. Contact him at [email protected].
This article originally appeared on Wausau Daily Herald: Wausau School District to increase student breakfast and lunch prices
Source Agencies
