This is week #3 of a 6-week series.

Our STC school district update this week is about day-to-day operations. There are a lot of moving parts to this week that all happen in unison. Here is a short list of this weeks topics. Transportation, lunch program, and personnel. Other key day-to-day subjects are budget and finance, athletics, and education. We will cover these 3 topics in the weeks to come. So let’s get started.

# 1 Transportation: Sometimes during the cold winter months someone is at work by 5 AM making decisions about the safety of holding classes. Most of the time the day starts at 6 AM. Then people start cleaning snow from the sidewalks, parking lots and making sure the buses start. Our district owns more than 40 cars, vans, buses, pickups, and mowers. Nearly all of the repairs to these vehicles are done in-house at the bus barn. This is a full-time job! Very few repairs are sent elsewhere. Our budget for transportation and repairs usually runs around a $965,000 a year. This includes bus drivers pay and benefits. Some of the vehicles we use daily have more than 200,000 miles.

It used to be when a sports team of 7 or 8 athletes went to a meet or game, they would take a bus. Now we cut costs and use a 12-passenger van that gets 18 miles per gallon instead of 5 miles per gallon using a bus. By using a van, you do not need a CDL and team coaches usually drive. We have 6 vans and 4 suburbans in our district. These vehicles get the majority of their mileage from shuttling students during the school day to and from the different schools and home. Six of our 22 buses run on LP, 2 are gasoline, and 14 run on diesel. The cost of LP usually runs around $1.30 per gallon. A gasoline or diesel powered bus fuel is more than $3 per gallon. The mileage for the buses is similar at 5-7 mpg. An average bus puts on about 10,000 miles a year.

#2 The lunch program: We have 3 cafeterias in our district between the 4 schools. We serve about 6,000 breakfasts per month and range from 13,000 to 18,000 lunches per month. Our school district has 1400 students but we prepare about 1,000 meals per day. That’s a lot of food! The lunch program is highly regulated by the USDA. Only American produced food is served in any US school, except for bananas and pineapples. Years ago, our meals were all made from scratch. That meant someone arriving at 5 AM to start mixing the dough, so it would be ready for lunch time. We now use mostly ready-to-eat processed foods in order to cut costs.

The average kitchen employee works 25 to 30 hours a week instead of a normal 40 hours. This change years ago saves the district more than $154,000 a year in benefits paid.

There are many nutritional guidelines that our staff has to follow. Each meal served has to have at least 3 sources of nutrition. There are five categories of food to choose from. These are fruits, veggies, dairy, meat and bread. The amount of food consumed is reported to the UDSA. Our district is 59% “free and reduced lunches” (FRL). However the meals served for lunch is around 80% FRL and close to 86% FRL for breakfasts. Many students eat breakfast at home before school and bring their own lunch. On a side note, starting last year our elementary school qualified to provide free meals to any student enrolled at the elementary. Starting this year, in addition to the elementary, the middle school also qualifies for free meals. The high school could qualify if more students were signed up for FRL.

Traditionally, the amount a family has to pay for their food is based on their income. A family of four with 2 children whose income is below $40,560 per year qualifies for “free” food while at school. A family of four who’s income falls below $57,720 qualifies for “reduced” prices. “Paid” for lunches is just that, paid for by the family at full price. Our district is considered a rural district in “severe need”. Because of our high FRL status, this qualifies our district for a larger refunded rate. STC district is reimbursed by both federal and state lunch programs.

The federal refund rate for free lunches is $4.27 per meal, reduced lunches are $3.87 per meal. And paid for lunches return $.42 cents per meal. The breakfast program returns about 35% less per meal served. Our district can produce meals for about half the refunded price, but often with the expenses of labor, equipment cost and repairs, we mostly break even. So in my opinion, you can see what’s so attractive to a high FRL student population.

The cost of food is put out for bids every year, however, only 1 or 2 suppliers will return a bid. For this next school year, we only received 1 bid each for milk and bread. I wish it was more competitive.

#3 Personnel: Every year our district will hire about 20 people to fill our vacancies. This is a constant challenge for our human resource department. Some new employees receive benefits and some don’t depending on the number of hours worked per week. Most people start at different pay schedules depending on their job description. So keeping that all straight for around 230 employees takes a lot of hard work. Our district manages every aspect of our employees paychecks, benefits and paid time off. The majority of the STC budget is for salaries and benefits. Out of the $21 million budget, $16,732,000 is paid out for personnel. This is all done in-house by our payroll department. Getting paychecks accurate and out on time is extremely important to everyone!

I can’t say enough about each of these departments and the job they do. I know there is a lot more to talk about relating to the role they have in keeping our district running smoothly every single day.

Again, my hat is off to all of them for making it happen. Their hard work is part of a much bigger picture; To graduate the best and brightest students we can at STC. Until next week, that’s how I see it!

Rick Hopper is a member of the South Tama County Community School District Board of Education.