For many public school districts, meals like Mandarin chicken at Compass Elementary School in Kansas City are the culmination of a treasure hunt for food. Frank Morris/NPR hide caption

For many public school districts, meals like Mandarin chicken at Compass Elementary School in Kansas City are the culmination of a treasure hunt for food.

Students in American public schools may eat more meals at school this year.

In the past, low-income children and school food in the entire region were free, and other children could also buy it, sometimes at a lower price. The school district is responsible for its own plan, which is then reimbursed by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), which is mainly used to subsidize meals. This year, due to the pandemic, all students can dine for free. The USDA is theoretically covering the cost, but shortages are limiting the program and the cost is rising.

These meals include breakfast, lunch, and dinner in some areas.

But labor issues make this food difficult to find, causing the school's most serious supply chain problem in decades. Purchasing is a nightmare. According to nutritionists and school district officials interviewed by NPR, some staple foods in school meals, such as chicken, may be difficult to buy, and your child’s lunch may have to be covered on a plastic corn flake tray.

They say that labor is the biggest problem. Food processing factories do not always have enough workers to keep production buzzing, trucking companies do not have all the drivers needed to transport food from the factories, and companies that supply schools cannot staff enough people in their warehouses.

School districts are high-volume, low-profit customers, many of whom are now scrambling to feed their students.

"It's like a huge hurricane," said Glenn Sims, director of nutrition services at the Hickman Mills School District in Kansas City. "And it keeps hitting us."

Sims' distribution company chooses to serve more profitable customers rather than some school districts. Kohl Wholesale, a company in her area that has been in use for many years, began to cancel truck shipments at the beginning of the school year, and cut ties with the area completely shortly afterwards. Other large distributors have taken the same approach to regions across the country, allowing people like Sims to feed thousands of students without a clear way to buy all the groceries they need.

Grennan Sims, director of nutrition services for the Kansas City Hickman Mills School District, is proud of the work she and her staff have done to piece together meals for the district's 5,600 students. Frank Morris/NPR hide caption

Grennan Sims, director of nutrition services for the Kansas City Hickman Mills School District, is proud of the work she and her staff have done to piece together meals for the district's 5,600 students.

"If you think about when the world will close in March 2020, and the next few months, and the empty shelves experienced, what people saw at the time is what we see now, but it's only exponential." Said.

Now, every meal that Sims and her staff put together is the culmination of a treasure hunt for 5,600 students in the area; a volunteer brought a box of chicken directly from the processing plant here, and there was a box of donated tableware there. , A new supplier gradually filled some of the vacancies, but it was uncertain. And this is happening across the country.

Diane Pratt-Heavner of the School Nutrition Association said: "We heard from schools across the country that they did not receive the food and supplies they ordered."

Pratt-Heavner said that some areas are scrambling to shop at Costco, Sam's Club or regional restaurant supply stations. She said they paid more money. For the same project, it doesn’t have to be more, but more money is needed to fill in the blanks they need to complete the menu. They can't get the same product they have been using. For example, in Sims' school district, she said that the price of chicken she can often purchase has more than doubled.

Pratt-Heavner pointed out that most areas have not fully calculated costs because they are in survival mode.

"Trying to reorder alternatives is so fast and angry that they don't even look at the price, and more importantly, what they can get. They must have a tray or main course or fruit or vegetables-they are going to order whatever they need ," Pratt-Heavner said.

The USDA is helping to bear the increased costs. The USDA is reimbursing school district fees at a price that is approximately 15% higher than the normal rate. It was announced that it would provide another 1.5 billion U.S. dollars in aid, but it has not yet stated how it will be distributed. The agency is also relaxing regulations.

But Pratt-Heavner stated that she does not believe that the additional funds from the USDA can cover all the additional costs the school bears.

At the same time, the USDA has not released the exact dollar amount of all these costs, partly because of the time lag in collecting information.

"We absolutely want schools to provide the most nutritious meals possible. We believe they also want the same, but we also believe that if the truck does not show up and they have no fruit cups to put, no school should be punished that day," the United States Cindy Long, Director of the Food and Nutrition Services Bureau of the Ministry of Agriculture said.

There may be fruits in some areas, but no cups or five-compartment trays for fruits. Lori Drenth, director of the Food and Nutrition Services Department of the Hernando County School District in Florida, said that until recently, five-compartment trays have been the basis of every meal. Normally, the area experiences about 5 million such accidents every year, but this year Durens is scrambling to find alternatives.

"I mean, really, I spent a lot of time on the Internet sorting out what I can put, what I can offer students, uh, menu items," Durance said.

By serving food on cornflakes bowl lids, pizza slice boxes, small deli meat trays, and 9-inch styrofoam trays, she has passed. She said she wanted to return to the reusable plastic trays that many people remember used in the school cafeteria. But even if she had the trays, she didn't have extra people to clean them, because in addition to shortages of food and one-time service products, Durance, like many other school nutritionists, herself faced severe labor shortages.

"There is only endless overcoming," Durens sighed. "Whether it is, you know, paper products or staffing, or salary or food, can be exhausting."

And no relief can be seen. Durens and others predict that the chaos of piecing together menus will continue at least at the end of the school year.