Their challenge is not unlike one the massive LA Unified Food Services division is facing: how to feed more than 640,000 kids daily for $50 million less a year.

According to November’s report of the Independent Financial Review Panel, Food Services has been a drain of about a $50 million a year on the district’s general fund, or $168.6 million over the past four years. In short, the division needs to pay for itself, the report said.

The report states: “The encroachment of the food services operations is not warranted and actions should be implemented immediately to curtail and eliminate any contribution from the General Fund to the Cafeteria Fund, thus saving roughly $50 million per year. Large urban districts with a high percentage of children eligible for the National School Lunch Program typically are able to sustain and grow their food service programs in a self-sufficient manner without contributions from other operating funds such as the General Fund.”

Laura Benavidez, the district’s interim co-director of food services, said the division is “constantly working to drive down costs” even as their meals programs have included free breakfasts for all students and suppers at some schools. “Our biggest costs are food and labor.” The district serves 127.8 million meals at 1,100 locations each year.

LA Unified’s average cost of all meals–breakfasts, lunches and dinners–is $1.70 per meal with the five requirements per serving. The restrictions and nutritional requirements are more rigorous at LA Unified than at the national or statewide levels.

“We’re able to provide more nutritional meals than the standards set at the national and state levels, and we’re always working on improving them,” Benavidez said.

Although there are no solid statistics comparing the cost per lunch at independent charter schools, Benavidez said the general costs for charter school lunches are $3.50 per meal. Nationally, the School Nutrition Association estimates private school lunches are made at $3.72 a serving, while the average traditional public school lunch is made at $1.20 a plate with the same nutritional requirements.

Some local independent charter schools have lunches for their students at $6 or $7 a meal, Benavidez said. Parents pay the extra costs for the homemade catered meals.

Currently, more than 2,800 students at 11 of the 211 independent charter schools in LA Unified are contracting out meals from the district’s Food Services department, Benavidez said. The charter schools are charged the same price as the rest of the district.

Other than setting the price for those charters that contract with the district, LA Unified has no other oversight or controls over meals served at independent charter schools. Although the district is responsible for monitoring charters and approving them in the district, that doesn’t include the food. Benavidez said, however, that if the staff sees something when visiting a charter site, the school will be notified of issues.

“There is not an oversight on our part, but we always try to encourage all the schools to utilize our services and information when they choose food,” Benavidez said. “If they participate in the National School Lunch Program, they have requirements they must follow.”

But LA Unified’s own rules are more rigorous. For example, some independent charter schools may allow chocolate milk to be served, which state rules allow, but LA Unified does not. Last month, the school board voted to make it the first large school district serving antibiotic- and hormone-free chicken and turkey.

Laura Benavidez of LAUSD Food Services

LA Unified is part of the Urban School Food Alliance, which is made up of the largest school districts in the nation, including New York, Chicago, Miami, Orlando and Dallas. Together they are asking for triple the amount of money now provided per school lunch by the USDA, Benavidez said.

On a recent visit to LA Unified, Keith Concannon, the USDA Undersecretary for Food, Nutrition and Consumer Services, told LA School Report, “We know there is more money needed for the per meal price, but there won’t be the money for it this year. They will want to take money from somewhere else if we do something like that. We are putting more than $1 billion to help low income schools, however. That may help.”

LA Unified has 18 high schools and two middle schools with culinary academies that offer cooking tracts. Teams from seven of them will cook in Friday’s competition at Los Angeles Trade Technical College.

Culinary students from Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies will also participate in Friday’s competition but won’t be eligible to win the D.C. trip because they are middle schoolers.

The winning team will get an all-expense-paid trip to Washington, D.C., to compete in the “Cooking up Change” National Competition against other students from Chicago, Houston, Dallas, St. Paul and other parts of the country. The only other California school district participating in the national competition is Orange County.

This is the third time LA Unified has participated in the 9-year-old competition. The last year LA Unified participated, in 2014, the team from Manual Arts Senior High School won second place.

Fame comes along with the free trip too.

“The winners will have their recipes included on the school menus next year,” Benavidez said. “And they’ll have bragging rights.”

The lunch ladies loved Marshall Matz. For more than 30 years, he worked the halls and back rooms of Washington for the 55,000 dues-paying members of the School Nutrition Association, the men and still mostly women who run America’s school-lunch programs.

They weren’t his firm’s biggest clients — that would have been companies like General Mills or Kraft — but Matz, wry and impish even in his late 60s, lavished the lunch ladies with the kind of respect they didn’t always get in school cafeterias.

Many of the association’s members considered him a dear colleague. “He would tell everybody: ‘You are a much better lobbyist than I am. You are how we get things done,’ ” said Dorothy Caldwell, who served a term as the association’s president in the early 1990s. “And people liked that.”

Read full story here.

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California Teacher Fund Needs $4.5 Billion Yearly Boost
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See also: AP

LAUSD Preschools to Get $7 Million in Security Upgrades
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LAUSD Hired Other Priests Accused of Sexual Abuse, Despite Warnings
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See also: LA Times

Call for Digital Textbooks Back Before the Legislature
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Should Doctors and Teachers Protect Their Own?
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Ex-Miramonte Teacher Could Face More Charges
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Education Miracles That Aren’t
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See also: LA Daily News

L.A. School District Sued Over Sexual Abuse of Students
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Ex-LAUSD Teacher Charged With Additional Molestation Felony
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See also: KPCC

Los Angeles River School Students Map Elysian Valley
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Rockers Help Students Roll on Toward Understanding
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Despite Budget Woes, Superintendents’ Pay Rises
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Head Start Requirement Boosts College Degrees for Early Childhood Educators
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For L.A. Schools, Stories of Modern-Day Martin Luther Kings
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Alliance of Big City School Districts Aims for More Healthful Meals
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See also: LA Daily News

Elementary Students Experience Their First Opera
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Help School Districts by Letting Them Raise Their Own Tax Revenue
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State Board Shifts Policy on Eighth Grade Algebra
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LA Schools Reinventing Art Education
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Contested UTLA Panel Elections Signal Internal Fissures
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See also: LA Daily News, KPCC

LAUSD School Tickets Still High Despite Reforms
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Watch: John Deasy Talks LAUSD Budget
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Federal Officials Reject California’s No Child Left Behind Waiver Request
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Why California Must Lead the Way in Closing Underperforming Charter Schools
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See also: LA Times, KCET

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$252,000 Goes to LAUSD to Promote Good Eating, Exercise
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At Aldama Elementary School, Parents Struggle to Break the News
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L.A. mayoral candidates discuss housing, education, city services
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LAUSD Collaborates With Parents to Improve New Nutritious Breakfast Program
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State Defunds Program to Fix ‘Slum’ Schools
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NAACP Volunteers to Push for Biggest Education Overhaul Since Brown v. Board of Education
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State Appointed Administrator of Inglewood School District Steps Down
Kent Taylor, the state administrator in charge of the financially troubled Inglewood School District, resigned from the position Friday after the Department of Education learned of a tentative agreement he made with the local teachers union without approval from the state. LA Times

Credentialing Commission Imposes Tougher Test to Become School Administrator
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After Generations of Failure, a School and Its Students Head for Success
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Does Creationism Have a Place at a Public School?
The Christian Club on an L.A. Unified campus has heard presentations from a nationally prominent creationist. A biology teacher believes such events undermine science education. LA Times Column (Steve Lopez)

School Lunches to Be Allowed Unlimited Meats, Grains, USDA Announces
The Agriculture Department is responding to criticism over new school lunch rules by allowing more grains and meat in kids’ meals. Huff Post

2012 National Board Certified Teachers Celebrated
UTLA honored the Class of 2012 National Board Certified Teachers last night in a ceremony at UTLA headquarters. National Board Certification is a voluntary program of teacher assessment that is rigorous and requires 200-400 hours of extra work on top of a teacher’s full teaching load.  UTLA

Ex-LAUSD teacher gets 25 years for molesting 13 Pacoima students Daily News: Chapel, of Chatsworth, pleaded no contest last month to committing lewd acts against seven girls and six boys. In exchange for a 25-year sentence, prosecutors dropped 15 additional counts that could have sent him to prison for life.

Former Miramonte student allegedly beaten at new school LA Times: A former Miramonte Elementary School student, who is among a group of children suing over alleged teacher sexual misconduct, has transferred from one middle school to another after she was allegedly beaten by other students.

California leads effort to boost English learner success Ed Source: A bill on Gov. Jerry Brown’s desk… would create a single definition of long-term English learners and require school districts to keep track of these students and report their numbers every year to the State Department of Education.

Brown signs legislation boosting summer school lunch program SI&A Cabinet Report: Existing law requires districts to offer each student at least one meal every school day, but there is a waiver process that can be pursued for summer session if the lunch program poses a fiscal hardship. AB 2555 by Assemblywoman Wilmer Carter, D-Rialto, increases the time period districts must meet in advance of the summer months for submitting the waiver request to the California State Board of Education.