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Unpaid balances for the Child Nutrition program of Bartlesville Public Schools have worsened considerably this school year.

Since the district can no longer "write off" negative balances at the end of an academic year, the unpaid balances impact the district's Child Nutrition fund.

If things do not improve, that fund will be depleted, requiring the district to re-impose the counter-intuitive alternate meals to avoid ever-escalating unpaid meal balances.

Last fall, when the trend line on unpaid balances showed they could reach $45,000 by June, the district began handing letters to students with unpaid balances to take home to their parents.

When that did nothing for the situation, the district started to use robocalls and sent texts to parents with negative balances. That improved things somewhat, but the unpaid balances still reached over $27,000 by the end of April 2019 and are expected to reach $32,000 by the end of the school year.

The Child Nutrition program of Bartlesville Public Schools provides 2,000 breakfasts and 4,000 lunches daily. The program is self-funded separately from all other district operations, and heavily reliant on federal free-or-reduced meal subsidies to make ends meet.

About 56-percent of the children in the district's elementary schools qualify for free-or-reduced meals. The percentage declines slightly to about 52-percent of the middle school students, while only about 40-percent of the high school students currently qualify.

The district is confident more students would qualify, particularly at the high school, but it is a struggle to get some families to apply annually, even with a convenient online application.

Bartlesville Public Schools said convincing families to apply for free-or-reduced meals would help reduce the unpaid meal balances, which have exploded since the district discontinued using alternate meals in 2017-18. 

Before then, when a student had a negative balance on their meal account, the hot meal they selected had to be thrown away at checkout and an alternate cold meal was provided to avoid further increasing the unpaid balance. While this technically balanced the books, it was counter-intuitive to throw away the hot meal and substitute the low-cost alternative, with concerns about inadvertently "meal shaming" students whose parents were not doing their part to cover the cost of a hot meal.

Beginning in 2017-18, the district discontinued the alternate meals and simply added the cost of the hot meal to a student's meal account balance. However, this caused the unpaid balances to skyrocket from about $1,400 annually to about $25,000 in 2017-18, which was only partially offset by a $10,000 anonymous donation from a district alumnus.

At that burn rate, the district will eventually be forced to bring back alternate meals in the coming years to avoid tapping its General Fund, which is mostly used for employee salaries.

Obvious solutions such as raising the prices on paid meals offer no relief since regulations also cap annual meal price increases to 10 cents per year, which is not nearly enough to offset the unpaid balances. The district does not have sufficient personnel to hound parents individually about unpaid balances, and personal calls to the top 10 families with unpaid balances have proven fruitless.

BPS said collection agencies are too expensive to hire for the problem and would no doubt alienate parents who struggle to make ends meet.

The district refuses to pursue other controversial measures which punish a student for a parent's failure to pay, such as denying students with unpaid meal balances access to extracurricular activities and events, which are an important part of every child's education.

If you have questions about schools meals and the dilemma the district is facing, please call the Child Nutrition department at 918-333-7966 or email Jon Beckloff, the Child Nutrition Manager, at BeckloffJL@bps-ok.org.

(Photo courtesy: Bartlesville Public Schools)