By GLYNIS HART
[email protected]
CLAREMONT — Schools Administrative Unit #6 school board tackled the problem of lost revenue for the food service program at its Thursday meeting. Cafeteria accounts that have gone into the red are one problem. Another problem is missing federal money, caused by human error in the district administration.
Two years in a row, the district has missed the deadline to apply for federal reimbursement for food service. In school year 2017-18, this meant losing revenue of $203,155. In 2018-19, the loss totaled $261,805.
“There will be a tax impact,” said Acting Superintendent Cory LeClair. It’s not clear what that impact will be.
School board member Jason Benware (Claremont) said, “People want to know how did this happen two years in a row? Can we give them a better timeline of how things went down?”
Finance Director Mike O’Neill said he will write out a timeline, which he can email to both Claremont and Unity school boards.
“I don’t mind if you make a timeline but it has to be ASAP,” said board member Carolyn Towle (Claremont).
The school lunch program is administered by a contractor, The Abby Group. However, it’s not part of their contract to file for federal lunch reimbursement funds.
“When the Abby Group came in they said they’d take care of everything,” said Rob McDevitt (Unity). “Nobody really knew what ‘everything’ meant.”
LeClair agreed. “When we switched there were a lot of questions about who was responsible for what components. But according to the FDA requirements, the school district can’t contract out certain responsibilities.”
LeClair stressed that at the time, she was not involved in those conversations.
According to O’Neill, in 2017-18 when the district hired Abby Group, there was confusion about the date to submit an RFP, which was required to be in the dozen pages of application documents to be sent to the federal government. In 2018-19 there was more confusion, possibly because the district tried to portion out tasks related to filing for reimbursement.
Several district staff are involved in the process of filing for federal reimbursement, which requires 22 separate attachments to the application.
“We made sure all the other stuff was submitted, because basically they told us the year before everything we submitted was wrong,” said O’Neill.
Chairman Michael Petrin (Claremont) observed that after the district hired the Abby Group and let go its food service director, it found it needed to hire back someone to do the financial part of the food service director’s duties.
In November 2018, SAU#6 hired Danielle Skinner as food service program assistant. Her job includes debt collection, making sure families eligible for assistance apply, handling complaints about payments not being applied to accounts, submitting claims every month, ensuring all the kitchens are able to pass inspections, and so forth.
One of Skinner’s duties is collecting overdue accounts. Students and staff unpaid accounts now amount to $22,993.
O’Neill said overdue accounts have gotten worse in the last couple years. “We used to be able to give them a substitute meal,” he said.
“The federal law changed what kind of meal you’re able to offer every child,” said LeClair. “There’s a misconception out there that kids aren’t eating, but this has not diminished their ability to have food.”
Three quarters of the overdue accounts are paid student accounts, 21 percent are benefit eligible, 2 percent are staff accounts and 2 percent are the accounts of students who have withdrawn.
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