Board approves food service outsourcing
The Red Oak School District will outsource their food service program.
During the school board’s regular meeting May 23, the board met with representatives of A’viands, and Taher Inc. to discuss their proposals for outsourcing and determine benefits. Both companies offered a proposal to hire the school’s existing food service employees at their current wages with the district.
Superintendent Tom Messinger said that conversations between both companies about their policy regarding insurance coverage for the employees led Messinger to prefer Taher as an outsourcing company.
“The school will pay the interim piece of the insurance through July, but we wanted to know what happened after. Bruce Taher said that with their proposal, we would pay the August insurance at around $9,000 and we would be reimbursed that amount over the course of several months before they took over paying the insurance coverage through their company starting in September,” Messinger said.
Taher also guaranteed a no-loss program. Currently the costs of the program are more than the program takes in. With Taher, the costs will be kept at zero loss at a minimum.
With A’viands, Messinger said the insurance for the employees would not be available until November. Tom Johnson, representing Taher Inc. advised the company would send a letter to the food service staff to organize employment through the company, and if no response was given to the letter, the employee would be called.
Foodservice Director Sharon Foote questioned what the benefit packages were regarding sick leave, personal leave, and vacation. Shirley Maxwell said the company’s policy is a half a day per month to start, but that Bruce Taher wanted their staff to meet with employees to discuss the options.
“They want to come down and find out what our benefits package is and see what they can do to make it comparable,” said Maxwell.
Maxwell added the employees would be employees of the district through July for the summer lunch program, then they would become employees of Taher beginning in August, if they chose.
Joy Steyer questioned comments from Messinger regarding the meals for the students being better through the outsourcing company, and whether or not outsourcing would increase the students eating school lunch.
We don’t know if it will boost the lunch count. I think the only way to boost the count is to have a closed campus during lunch at the high school, which we can’t do because we don’t have a big enough cafeteria at this time, or we need more lunch chefs,” Steyer said.
Messinger said his comments regarding lunch were not meant as a personal criticism of the employees, but were intended to illustrate that schools are asked to hold a number of different roles throughout the school year, and that they don’t have the expertise to provide the support for employees in every area.
“The schools we’ve talked to have said participation in school lunch goes up, and the feedback given is that the meals are more pleasing and better for the kids as a result of outsourcing. That’s not a criticism to our foodservice as much as it is to the whole district. We don’t know how to constantly change what we do in foodservice to meet the tastes and interests of the kids. That’s what the companies do, and we expect them to be much better at that than we are as a school,” Messinger said.
The board unanimously approved the contract of Taher Inc. for outsouring the food service program beginning in August, at the current wages of the district’s employees.