School board hears about money owed cafeterias | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's Note: This article originally appeared in the Beaufort Observer.

    You might want to read this article from the Charleston, West Virginia, Daily Mail before reading the following article about Tuesday's school board meeting. It says, among other things: "Schools have accumulated nearly $3.2 million worth of unpaid bills over the past 10 years. There are 18,065 delinquent student accounts for that time period, said Gary Cochran, child nutrition director."

    Tuesday night (8-16-11) the Beaufort County Board of Education heard from its child nutrition director that the local school system suffered a "deficit" of "...a little over $8,000" last year in uncollected lunchroom charges. This in a program that has lost over a million dollars in the last ten years. But that was before Gwyn Roberson-McBride and the current superintendent, Dr. Don Phipps, came to Beaufort County. But it is the same board of education for the most part that oversaw the loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars without asking what the accounts receivable situation was in the school lunchrooms. At least if they asked, they obviously did little to correct the problem.

    You can hear the director's presentation in the video clip below and you will want to hear what the plans are for correcting this situation. Be sure to pick up board member Terry Williams' (serving his first year on the board) point that most of the loss came in two of the fourteen schools. That is important because as the school board presided over that million dollar loss they never asked to see the breakdown of the financial reports by school and the previous administration never provided that information. Why? Because, as they told us when we asked for it, they didn't collect that information. They did not know which schools were losing money and which were making money or breaking even. Obviously "collectibles" play a role in that situation, as we have learned with the hospital.

    Here's the video:



Commentary

    From all we have seen, Mrs. Roberson-McBride is doing a much better job of managing the school food service funds than was done before she and Dr. Phipps arrived. We suspect that if there is a problem in two schools that is significantly different from the other schools, the problem is with the principals of those schools. But that cannot be assumed, unless the principals were routinely informed of the financial status of their cafeterias. A quick check with two of them confirms what we suspected: They are not routinely informed about the financial condition of their food service finances. We suspect that is about to change.

    But having been a principal and a superintendent (who inherited a huge deficit operation in school food service), I will attest to the fact that this problem of "accounts receivables" is not an easy thing to solve.

    You might think that if students really cannot afford to pay for their meals, it would be an easy matter to get them signed up for free lunch. But getting some parents to do that is sometimes not an easy task, for reasons that are too complex to go into here. It is just a fact of life. So what do you tell your cafeteria manager if you are the principal and he/she tells you a couple of dozen students either don't qualify for free lunch or will not bring in completed applications? I'll tell you, it is pretty hard to watch a six- or seven-year-old kid go without anything to eat all day. But when it becomes a chronic problem of not paying, it becomes a management problem to be solved.

    We'll bet that this time next year this problem will be non-existent, but the problem of irresponsible parents will not only still be with us, it will be worse.

    Click here to go to the Child Nutrition page on the BCS website which has a link to download the Free Lunch applications.