More than 425 cafeteria workers in the Houston school district will have their wages slashed this month, dozens of other positions will be cut and students likely will pay more for lunch next year to cover a multimillion-dollar budget shortfall.
The Houston Independent School District also is expected to take the rare step this year of spending $10.5 million from savings — about 3 percent of the account — to meet cafeteria expenses.
“That's money taken out of education,” HISD Chief Financial Officer Melinda Garrett said.
HISD Superintendent Terry Grier, who took over the state's largest school system in September, said part of the deficit could have been avoided with better management.
Some of the shortfall can be attributed to revenue lost during Hurricane Ike, when cafeteria meals weren't sold but workers were paid. In a separate incident, the district had to toss $1.5 million worth of food because of an ammonia leak.
Still, Grier said, payroll expenses should have been cut sooner, and the district should not have been serving what he dubbed “platinum” meals with pricey fresh fruit daily.
Grier said he learned about most of the budget woes from Garrett about two weeks ago. He shared the news publicly last week following the resignation of HISD chief business officer Richard Lindsay, who oversaw food service, construction, maintenance, transportation and police.
Officials from Aramark, the private company HISD pays to run food services, told district staff at an October meeting that school cafeteria workers' hours should be trimmed, but the cuts never happened, Grier said.
HISD began cooking its food at a new $35 million centralized facility last year — a move that should have meant reduced hours for school-based employees who only need to warm and serve meals, Grier said.
Later this month, 425 of about 1,680 cafeteria workers will have their hours slashed — some by 30 minutes and others by three hours a day — and another 57 workers will see their positions cut, Garrett said. For a worker who sees a three-hour cut, the weekly paycheck will be cut roughly in half to $150.
“These are the lowest-paid employees in the district,” Houston Federation of Teachers President Gayle Fallon said. “That's the really sad thing. These are your minimum-wage workers that they're taking it out on.”
Grier said he expects to ask the school board to raise lunch prices next school year from $1.75 to “probably no more than $2.” Most students don't pay the full amount because they qualify for free- or reduced-priced meals under the federal school lunch program.
High schools also might have to stop selling food from outside vendors, including name-brand pizza and chicken,
