Tooele County School District school lunches pulled off an “A+” in a recent performance audit.
State and federal officials completed a three-day review of Tooele County School District’s food service program last month.
The examination was a routine audit, but it was the first lengthy audit since 2012, when major changes in the federally-funded Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act went into effect, according to Elva Roberts, Tooele County School District food service supervisor.
“This was a much more detailed review than we have ever had,” she said. “They changed the process to make sure that people understand the new rules and are following them.”
The audit started with reviewing 590 student applications for the free or reduced price lunch program.
“They looked over each application to see if there were any mistakes,” Roberts said. “None were found.”
The auditors looked at the school district’s menus, recipes, and other records.
“We are required to keep a copy of the label from one of every can of every kind of food that we use in preparing our food,” Roberts said. “We enter the information from those cans into a computer program that determines the nutritional information for every meal.”
That nutritional information determines if the week’s menu meets USDA requirements. It is also used to write recipes for every item on the menu. The recipes are sent to schools for the lunchroom staff to follow, according to Roberts.
“They looked at our files to make sure we had copies of all the labels,” she said.
The auditors also made on-site visits to Harris Elementary, Stansbury Park Elementary, Grantsville Junior High School, and Wendover High School.
“At each school they pulled out their records and examined them,” Roberts said.
The auditors also observed the serving of school lunch at the schools.
“The only comment they made during the whole process was we need to offer more cheese, as a meat alternative, at the secondary schools with the soup bar,” said Carrie Palmer, Tooele County School District food service secretary.
Regulations for school lunches developed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to comply with the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 went into effect in the fall of 2012.
The new guidelines were designed to increase the amount of vegetables, fruits and whole grains served to students while decreasing the amount of fats, sodium and foods with little nutritional value.
The regulations require that the district offer foods from five categories, including fruits, vegetables, grains, milk and meat or meat alternatives. Students are required by the regulations to take at least one food from three of the categories — one of which must be a fruit or vegetable.
The USDA initially proposed regulations that limited the amount of starchy vegetables, including potatoes, that could be served for school lunches to one cup per week.
However, the U.S. Senate came to the potato’s rescue and passed legislation in 2011 that prohibited the USDA from adopting any limitation on the serving of starchy vegetables — defined as white potatoes, corn, green peas, and lima beans — in school lunch programs. While potatoes are now unrestricted, limits on fat in lunches caused deep fryers to be pulled out of kitchens, eliminating a student favorite: the deep fried French fry.
In most years, a staff member from the Utah State Office of Education’s Child Nutrition Programs conducts the annual audit, Roberts said.
This year the audit team included Kathleen Britton, the director of USOE Child Nutrition Program and Adam Race, a senior program specialist with USDA’s Denver office of the school nutrition program.
“We were a little nervous,” Roberts said. “But when they left they said they were pleased with what they saw here.”
The Tooele County School District will provide a federally funded free lunch program during the summer, according to LeAnn Hammond, food service secretary. The summer lunch program will run from May 31 until August 12.
Children through the age of 18 receive a free lunch through the summer lunch program, according to federal guidelines. Traditionally the summer lunch program is offered at Harris, Northlake, and Anna Smith Elementary Schools.
In 2016, because of planned construction at Harris Elementary School, the school district is looking for another location for summer lunch in Tooele City that meets federal guidelines, Hammond said.