Surplus Food Cuts Starve Lunch Programs in Schools

Dwindling stockpiles of surplus food are creating severe shortages in school food programs throughout the country, causing school districts to raise prices and students to drop out of lunch programs in large numbers, educators and government officials say.

While schools are being pressured to improve student nutrition, many are losing large chunks of their cafeteria budgets because federal surpluses of cheese, powdered milk, beef and other commodities have dried up.

After relying on government surpluses for nearly a decade, districts throughout the country are having to buy food that had formerly been free--at the same time that food prices are skyrocketing because of shortages caused by the Christmas freeze in Florida and Texas, the San Francisco Bay Area earthquake and the lingering effects of the 1988 drought.

As a result, the loss of so-called “bonus commodities” from the U.S. Department of Agriculture is bringing many school food programs close to disaster. The problem is a dramatic example of competing needs--the budget deficit versus the nation’s schoolchildren--and shows in tangible terms how agricultural policy directly affects the food on cafeteria trays.

“Schools around the country are having to cope with these massive shortfalls,” said Kevin Dando, spokesman for the American School Food Service Assn. “This is the school year when it’s really been a major trauma. The term I keep hearing about this is ‘the silent erosion of the school lunch program.’ ”

The loss of bonus commodities could be even more serious for schools if budget cuts proposed by President Bush on Monday are enacted. Under the proposed budget, the school lunch program will be cut by $180 million in 1991 by making it more difficult for families to qualify for free school lunches for their children.

“We’re worried about low-income kids not having access to any lunch at all,” said Edward Cooney, deputy director of the Food and Research Action Center. “We’re concerned that the health and nutritional status of low-income children will be at risk because of the absence of commodities, coupled with the cuts in budgets.”

After losing more than $7 million in federal food subsidies, the Los Angeles Unified School District raised its lunch prices from 50 cents to 75 cents for elementary school children and from $1.25 to $1.50 for secondary students. As a result, the district says, 1.4 million fewer lunches will be sold at school this year, a drop of 13% over the 1988-89 school year.

For some students, that means no lunch at all, said Stephen Garcia, director of the school district’s food services branch. For others, “rather than have a nutritious meal, they’ll buy junk food at the local 7-Eleven or some carbonated drink and candy at one of our student stores,” he said.

A typical meal purchased at a Los Angeles school could include the following: burrito or empanada, taco sauce, fresh fruit, apple-oatmeal cookie and milk. It is a far cry from a candy and a Coke, and it supplies about one-third of a child’s recommended daily nutritional needs.

Congress passed the National School Lunch Act in 1946 to provide such lunches “as a measure of national security,” after one-third of all draftees rejected for service in World War II were found to be physically unfit because of nutritional deficiencies.

Billion Cut

The program’s most recent problems began with the 1981 Omnibus Reconciliation Act, the Reagan Administration’s attempt to cut the national budget by $35 billion and deal with the deficit. As part of the law, the Administration cut $1 billion from the school lunch program, said Edward Cooney, deputy director of the Food and Research Action Center.

At the same time, school districts were promised by the Agriculture Department that the cuts would be mitigated with a free flow of government surplus food, Cooney said. The foodstuffs were called “bonus commodities,” because they were given to schools in addition to food and monetary support mandated by Congress.

The bonus commodities helped the schools during a difficult time. They also helped the federal government, which had stockpiled several billion dollars in surplus dairy products in an effort to stabilize the dairy industry.

The surpluses came about because of a policy that turned the federal government into the market of last resort for the nation’s dairy farmers. If dairy herds over-produced and farmers could not sell the surplus, the government bought it. By the early 1980s, buying the surplus products was costing the government too much money, and storing it added to the bill.

The bonus commodity program solved the problem. Its attraction to schools was that they could get as many bonus commodities as they could use without waste. One of the major items given out was cheese, of which there was so much surplus that the government kept it in caves near Kansas City, Mo.

But by 1988 the surpluses began to dwindle, Cooney said, even though the school lunch funding cut in 1981 was not replaced. One reason for the drop in surpluses, in addition to food-giveaway programs, was the Dairy Termination Act of 1985, which paid dairy farmers to go out of business in an effort to cut overproduction. Approximately 1.5 million cows were slaughtered through the dairy buyout.

In the 1986-1987 school year, cafeterias received $442 million in bonus commodities from the USDA, said Philip Shanholtzer, a spokesman for the agency. In the current fiscal year, that assistance has shrunk to about $125 million; about $100 million of that surplus food is butter.

“The only thing I’m being offered in bonus commodities is butter, and I have plenty of butter,” said Mary Klatko, director of food and nutrition services for Howard County Public Schools in Ellicott City, Md. “We still had cheese all of last year in the state of Maryland, right through June. We came back in September to no cheese.”

As a result, the school district is buying cheese and other commodities on the open market. Between August and December, 1989, Klatko saw her food prices rise 18%, largely because of the drought and other natural disasters. Pizza, a cafeteria favorite, was hardest hit, she said.

“I was paying 17.5 cents per slice (of pizza) last year because of the bonus cheese,” Klatko said. “I’m now paying 35 cents. . . . I used to offer it every day in the elementary schools as an alternate. Now it’s the highest priced item we have on the menu. I had to cut it to three days a week.”

School cafeterias have traditionally been self-sufficient, but the Memphis city schools’ food service branch will have to borrow from the city’s Board of Education for the first time next year, to make up for an anticipated loss of $1.5 million in surplus food from the federal government.

“I’ve been in school food service for 20 years, and this is the first year I can remember this kind of impact on our program,” said Shirley Watkins, director of food and nutrition services for the Memphis city schools. “The real trauma for all of us is that we do not see any light at the end of the tunnel.”

The Anaheim Union High School District will lose $160,000 in commodities this school year, amounting to about 11% of its total food budget, said Bea Nash, food services director. Cutbacks in the availability of certain diary products are having the biggest impact.

Nash said the district no longer receives non-fat milk, used to make dressings for the schools’ popular salad bars. And a lack of cheese has made pizza, another school favorite, more expensive.

In San Diego, 17% of the students who buy lunch at school have dropped out of the program. Last July, facing a $600,000 loss in government commodities, the city’s Board of Education raised lunch prices by 20 cents, and 305,000 fewer lunches will be sold this year.

Needy children who qualify under constantly tightening criteria can still receive a free lunch at school. But Jane Boehrer, the San Diego schools’ food services director, said that moderate- and low-income families are terribly “price-sensitive” and are quick to react when school lunch prices are raised.

The result, she said, is dangerous: “A student who is not economically needy can become nutritionally needy because of poor management of funds or social difficulties in the family. I worry about them. If a child doesn’t eat well, they don’t learn well.”

On Tuesday, Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) announced that the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry will hold hearings on bonus commodities and other nutrition issues in late February.

“The Administration’s proposed cutbacks are made even worse by the recent reduction in surplus commodities available for school lunch programs,” said Leahy, chairman of the committee. “This makes it tougher for schools to provide a decent meal at a decent price.”

Times staff writers Chris Woodyard and Thuan Le in Orange County contributed to this story.