The Board of Education of Jefferson City Public Schools approved dairy, grocery and produce contracts Monday night, and hinted at public discussions in the coming months about school bus routes.
The district's Board of Education approved a dairy contract with Jefferson City-based Graves Menu Maker Foods, ending an at least 40-year relationship with Prairie Farms-owned Central Dairy as JCPS' dairy provider.
"We feel like we can handle this," Menu Maker's owner Tracy Graves told the board in open forum.
"We know what it means to make sure that the dairy product is there. We know what it means to make sure that it's in good shape, that it's consumable," echoed Cal Graves, the company's vice president of Business Development, Program Sales.
The board had questions and concerns at its previous meeting about Menu Maker's ability to deliver on its contract, which complicated a usually simple process of the board approving the lowest bid for a contract - which Menu Maker's was.
"I wanted to be sure that this can be provided and this can be done in the fashion we're used to," JCPS director of school nutritional services Dana Doerhoff said Monday.
"We also wanted to feel like we were doing due diligence on our part," board treasurer Lorelei Schwartz added.
The board approved the dairy contract with Menu Maker with a 5-1 vote - board member Scott Hovis voted via phone against it, and board member Lori Massman was absent Monday.
Menu Maker's General Manager Lance Gorney shared in open forum that Menu Maker sells dairy products to 211 schools, 18 of which buy liquid dairy products. Five of those 18 schools have their entire daily dairy programs serviced by Menu Maker.
JCPS financial records show in the 2018 fiscal year that just ended, the district paid Central Dairy $411,923.38.
During the same year, the district paid Menu Maker $1,066,875.92 for grocery items.
The board also approved produce and grocery contracts for the coming year at its meeting Monday.
Menu Maker was awarded the contracts for an estimated $113,894.64 worth of produce and another $374,680.95 for grocery items.
Illinois-based Kohl Wholesale was also awarded the contracts for an estimated $110,565.84 of produce, and another $647,599.13 for grocery items.
That puts the total estimated cost of produce for the district for the 2018-19 school year at $224,460.48, and another $1,022,280.08 for grocery items.
Though the 2018-19 school year hasn't even started yet, JCPS chief financial and operating officer Jason Hoffman told the board it's time to start thinking about bus routes for the 2019-20 school year, given the district will have a second high school open then.
"Going to two middle schools and two high schools, it sets up really well to run secondary (bus) routes all together and elementary routes all together. It's been a complaint of our elementaries that we're not all on the same starting time," Hoffman said.
"It's a really good opportunity for us to look at moving all the elementary start times to the same time, moving all the secondary to the same time. It gets us out of the transfer at Simonsen on the street. We'll still probably have transfers between the middle schools and high schools, but we could do it off city streets," he added.
He said once the district finalizes any attendance boundary line changes to accommodate Capital City High School and students are enrolled, re-routing discussions with First Student will start - the district contracts its bus service through First Student - and after a lot of work this September, he anticipated coming back to the board in October or November this year with a recommendation on bus route changes for 2019-20.
Hoffman agreed there should be opportunity for public input and committee work on the issue, after Schwartz said "as I recall, the last time we discussed this, it was quite a hot topic with the public."
JCPS Superintendent Larry Linthacum said the district will hold as many meetings as it needs to, and the public will be involved in the process of school bus re-routing.
Linthacum added he expects the board will receive an attendance boundary line recommendation in September.
A boundary line committee has been working for months to come up with boundary line options that strive for enrollment and poverty-level equity between CCHS and Jefferson City High School.
The committee narrowed its options down to three this summer - all of which have Thorpe Gordon Elementary School's students attending Lewis and Clark Middle School, instead of splitting as they do now between the two middle schools. One of the three options move some Cedar Hill Elementary School students to South Elementary School, and another keeps that group of Cedar Hill students who live near CCHS at Cedar Hill, but then still has them attend Thomas Jefferson Middle School instead of Lewis and Clark.