EF extends food service contract

The agreement with The Nutrition Group carries a guaranteed profit for the 2025-26 school year.

The Elizabeth Forward school board has approved a one-year extension for its contract with The Nutrition Group, its food service management company.

The term is July 1 to June 30, 2026, with a profit guarantee of at least $13,162. EF will be reimbursed by The Nutrition Group should the profit be less than that amount.

The school district plans to invest that money into renovation projects, according to Superintendent Keith Konyk.

“We talked a little bit about some of that money that will have to be spent to do improvements to our kitchen areas or our cafeteria areas,” Konyk said. “We will be talking about that probably as we get a little bit into construction. We will put those together, but we do have some money that is available through this program due to the fact that we’ve been accumulating some of those monies and we will reinvest those into the building.”

During a recent school board meeting, Kelly Patterson, regional manager with The Nutrition Group, stated that the focus this year is the customer experience. She presented some of the activities and programs all the schools are participating in through their lunches, including donuts with grownups, holiday carving, stir-fry stations and more.

“It’s so much more than just school lunch,” Patterson said. “It’s so much more than just a menu, and I am really proud of the work that they have been doing here. Our goal is to always generate enough profit for you to cover equipment and things like renovation projects so we don’t have to lean back on the general fund on those things.”

As of February, they budgeted 526 breakfast meals per day across the district, and the district is serving an average of 605 meals, according to Patterson.

She added that lunches were budgeted for 1,029 meals and the district is serving 1,052. A la carte sales were budgeted at 641 and the district has an average 923 items sold per day.

“So that is just a great testament to the programs running well, the students are enjoying the program and they are participating,” Patterson said. “Your bottom line is better than what the budget said it would be, so through February, your budget said your bottom line would be around a $17,000 loss and you are actually sitting at a $65,000 return.”

Free and reduced lunch programs

Patterson added the budget also includes free breakfasts for students under the state’s School Breakfast Program.

In fiscal year 2023, schools served nearly 2.4 billion breakfasts under the School Breakfast Program nationwide. In Pennsylvania, the participation number is more than 500,000 meals daily.

In Gov. Josh Shapiro’s 2025-26 budget, 1.7 million students across the state will continue to receive free breakfast at school, regardless of their income. Last school year, more than 90 million breakfast meals were served in schools — nearly 10 million more than in the previous school year.

During a previous meeting, the topic of free breakfasts and delinquent district lunch accounts was raised by board member Megan Ferraro. She explained that when students do not have money in their school cafeteria accounts, the district is required to serve them, which can result in delinquent accounts.

“I found out through an agency that is there to provide support to families and they are getting requests from families to assist in these negative bills, so I know there is the free and reduced lunch program,” Ferraro said. “Is it that people aren’t applying for it? Is it that they are not eligible for it? It just seems overwhelming how many delinquent school accounts that we have.”

Konyk said the district makes calls to homes that have delinquent accounts, but they are limited to what they can do based on state laws.

Families can apply for free or reduced meals online. Students are unable to get a diploma down the line if their bills are not paid and everything from the school isn’t turned in by the time they graduate.

“We really do have a lot of steps in place, and if we find that somebody that is in that negative balance, that’s one of those things we really try to push for to see if they are free,” Konyk said. “Anytime we find that folks are struggling with payments, we always do a quick check of those people to make sure they are eligible and go through the process of filling out the paperwork.”

Assistant Superintendent Dr. Mary Carole Perry said families cannot ignore the letter that comes in the mail from the state for them to sign up for free or reduced meals at school.

Konyk mentioned that back in 2016, Pennsylvania outlawed the practice of denying lunch to public school students who don’t have money on hand to pay for it.

A Canon-McMillan School District cafeteria worker quit over a policy she called “lunch shaming,” where students with unpaid lunch balances were reportedly denied hot meals and given cold sandwiches instead. That sparked national attention and led to a broader discussion about school meal debt and student stigmatization.

A “lunch shaming” ban, which prohibited schools from stigmatizing students for unpaid school lunch debt, was reinstated in the state in 2024, and now includes a provision for a School Meal Debt Fund to address outstanding debts.

Konyk said some of the district’s elementary schools have 50% or more students on free and reduced lunches, and the high school is at around 33%.

“We are very limited in what we can do, and we have to make sure we feed those kids. That bill can get very high, and we are still required to serve those kids,” Konyk said. “Whether there’s a stigma attached to it, whether as adults we do something differently, I’m not sure, but that number goes down.

“We don’t have any fewer socioeconomic disadvantaged kids at the high school. We have that many kids that fill it out, which is really a challenge and it really comes into play when we have these large balances. It is limited in what we can do. The whole process is not our process, it’s the state’s process, so our process is just to support people in filling out the paperwork.”