News Talk 94.1/AM 1600 Where The Upper Cumberland Talks
The Van Buren School Board concerned about the cafeteria fund after reviewing the 2024 fiscal year audit, which showed that the cafeterias are losing money.
Director of Schools Jared Copeland said the cafeteria fund has dropped around $100,000 since the 2022 fiscal year. Copeland said a couple of reasons has led to the cafeteria losing money.
“Cost of food supplies have increased in some ways up to 40 percent just depending on what it is,” Copeland said. “We have talked about this CEP (Community Eligibility Provision) which we all agree is great for our community but our families don’t always reimburse us the total amount that we put into it.”
Copeland said some menu items are losing the cafeteria money for example, the school is charging 95 cents per cup of ice cream when the school system is paying $1.95 per cup from the distributor. Copeland said he and Supervisor of Nutrition And Food Services Christy Troglen will review and look at ways the school system can address the issue.
“Along with that some changes to menu items to try to find things that close the gap better,” Copeland said. “Then we’ve tried to reduce paper and plastic consumables and get away from that after COVID and get back to using in-house trays and silverware and stuff like that.”
Copeland said the budget needs to be addressed as the school system may have to replace aging cafeteria equipment within the next few years. Copeland said the equipment would not need to be addressed right now but something the board should keep in mind.
“We’ve had three or four repairs to our freezer at the high school already in the last year and a half,” Copeland said. “Elementary has had some problems you know, the high school building at this point is 30 years old and the elementary school is not too far behind so that’s a concern as we look to the future that we may have to start replacing some expensive equipment.”
Copeland said the school system had already begun taking steps to address the issue back in July when they raised lunch prices. Copeland said outside of the cafeteria budget he is quite pleased where the budgets stand and that the school system increased the general purpose fund balance in 2024 by 20 percent.
