Some Minnesota schools shut out of free meals

Every day at 11:15 a.m., students at the Math and Science Academy crush into a kitchenette and start heating up their lunches in a bank of microwaves.

The school does not have the kind of big kitchen that can make lunch for all 700 middle and high school students on the school’s Woodbury campus, so students bring lunch from home or buy snacks from vending machines.

It’s not the ideal situation, said Kate Hinton, the school’s executive director, but it works. Still, the way some charter schools handle school lunch means they are not able to offer free breakfasts and lunches as part of the the universal free school meals program the Legislature passed in 2023. Math and Science Academy is one of 11 schools, all charter schools, that do not participate in the program.

While most of the state’s charter schools operate in buildings with commercial kitchens that can accommodate food service, a few are in spaces like former office buildings without much kitchen capacity. Building a new commercial kitchen is rarely in schools’ budgets.

Other charters just prefer to do lunch a little differently. For example, one school serves meals family style, so it’s not eligible to participate in the federal school meals program or the state’s free meals, while others have decided to run their own meal programs in an effort to save money.

Students who go to school online are not getting free breakfasts and lunches either. But considering all the students who can’t benefit from the free meals program, usually the problem is the lack of a school kitchen.

DREAM Technical Academy in Willmar educates 90 students in a converted cottage on the grounds of a former state hospital. The building does not have a kitchen, so students don’t get school lunch.

Tammie Knick, the school’s social worker and one of the founders, said she has been trying for years to work out something with a nearby school or a contractor to bring in lunch, but it’s been almost a decade of false starts, ignored phone calls and too-expensive contract proposals from both businesses and nonprofit organizations.

“A lot of our kids just don’t eat, and it breaks our hearts,” Knick said.

About 80% of students come from low-income families, she said. Sometimes the school gets donations from a local food shelf or from the Jennie-O turkey company, which has corporate offices in town. Otherwise, Knick said she does her best to connect families to food pantries or other sources of low-cost food to help feed students. While the school would like to have a kitchen, money and suitable space are in short supply.

“We’ve tried to look at other spaces, but there’s nothing around Willmar,” Knick said.

For the St. Paul Conservatory for Performing Artists, not having school lunch is part of the appeal for some students, said principal Brian Goranson. Students can bring lunch, or venture into downtown St. Paul to grab a bite. Goranson said that bit of independence is often attractive.

The conservatory does not have a kitchen in its downtown building, and he said the school has never had the money to build or staff one. The board is trying to figure out how to offer school lunch in order to join the free meal program, but it’s not yet clear how that could be accomplished.

Other schools worry that not being able to offer free meals will hurt their recruitment efforts.

Northfield’s Arcadia Charter School stopped participating in the National School Lunch Program in the mid-2010s, said Laura Stelter, the school’s director, because it required more paperwork and was more expensive than just buying meals for all the students who would have qualified for free and reduced-price lunch. At least, it used to be cheaper, she said: The cost of meals from a private catering company started rising. Now Arcadia has “pre-packaged, shelf-stable” meals to give to students from low-income families.

This year, the school is using its operating budget to pay for food for all students, and Arcadia is working to get back into the National School Lunch Program, though Stelter said it will mean making cuts elsewhere.

“We felt that asking families to pay that amount when everyone else is getting free lunches was going to make it even more difficult to recruit students,” she said.