Staffed Up is a monthly series examining school staffing best practices and solutions for teacher recruitment and retention. Catch up on previous installments here.
Competition for foodservice staff is rampant in a tourist-heavy location like Orlando, Florida.
As Orange County Public Schools searches for new ways to find and retain school nutrition staff in its cafeterias, the Florida district has to persistently fight for the same employees sought by Disney World, Universal Studios, Sea World and thousands of other area restaurants and hotels.
The district oversees 1,500 staff and managers in food and nutrition services, said Mark Watson, the department’s senior director at Orange County Public Schools. At the same time, there’s a shortage of 150 staff — a small portion of which are manager positions.
“There’s always been a shortage, but never this much,” Watson said. “In the last four or five years, it’s been a little bit higher because of the pandemic, and people want to work remote, so it’s been a challenge for us.”
Orange County Public Schools — with around 208,800 students — is not alone in this common staffing plight. Some 90% of school nutrition directors reported facing staffing shortages heading into the 2023-24 school year, according to a recent School Nutrition Association survey of 1,343 school nutrition directors.
Creative retention approaches
There are some bright spots, though, as Orange County Public Schools saw a decline in open school nutrition staff positions in the last 1.5 years — dropping from 200 to 150, Watson said.
In recent years, the district adapted to staffing challenges by holding regional job fairs for hourly positions and offering $2,000 sign-on and $200 referral bonuses.
Those bonuses are built into the district’s budget as a result of union negotiations, he said.
Watson also works to ensure his staff are regularly recognized for their work through awards, team building activities and an annual gala.
This school year, the district also launched a pay for performance program for food and nutrition services managers. On average, managers make about $42,000 per year, Watson said. But under the goal-oriented program, they can earn up to an additional $7,500 annually.
Managers can earn some extra cash if they meet a certain number of district goals set around priorities such as food costs, staff training and health inspections, Watson said. The more goals managers meet, the larger the portion of $7,500 they will receive, he added.
Now several months into the program, Watson said he hopes it will help retain both managers and staff, because the goals push managers to take better care of their employees by focusing on retention efforts.
“You have to put a little money aside in your budget for retention to recognize people, to say thank you for doing a good job,” Watson said. “The districts who don’t do that, that’s where they have a lot of people jumping ship basically and going to places that are going to do that.”
The impacts of a ‘revolving door’
When a district faces school nutrition staffing shortages, the cost to train new employees is high, Watson said. “If you have a revolving door, your expenses are going to go up tremendously.”
That revolving door of new staff also means there’s a lack of consistency in service, and the “students feel that,” he said. Inconsistency can also lead to less personal interactions between students and school nutrition staff.
The shortage, overall, might lead schools to close down certain serving lines for meals. When lunch lines grow longer as a result, Watson said it disrupts students’ time to eat and can ultimately interfere with instructional time, because more time is needed to get through the line and finish a meal.
As universal school meals become more of a reality programs through state-level legislation or the federal Community Eligibility Provision, staffing challenges can be further strained.
Orange County Public Schools is in its first year serving free meals under the Community Eligibility Provision. Daily participation in lunch alone increased by 17,000 meals served compared to last year, according to Watson. That growth in demand, he said, would have been incredibly difficult to sustain if there were still 200 open positions like the previous year.
At Colorado's Aurora Public Schools, student breakfast and lunch participation jumped 13% to 20% since universal school meals were implemented at the start of this school year, according to Shannon Solomon, the district’s director of nutrition services.
The state’s Healthy Schools Meals for All law passed in a referendum vote in November 2022 and will also provide schools additional funding in the 2024-25 school year for front line kitchen staff wage increases or stipends.
Dedicate a role for staffing
There are only three open staff positions out of 285 in Aurora’s nutrition services department, Solomon said. The district also projected needing 30 additional staff members for nutrition services ahead of the state’s enactment of universal school meals, Solomon said.
Aurora Public Schools doesn’t have a shortage of employees in nutrition services, because Solomon strategically hired a full-time specialist solely dedicated to staffing. If someone isn’t focused on staffing priorities for at least five to 10 hours consistently each week, Solomon said, “then you’re never going to get off what I call the insanity staffing loop.”
It’s important to also think outside the box to address staffing, Solomon said. For instance, Aurora Public Schools has a program that hires high school students to work three hours in the afternoon for school nutrition services. The district also has flexible hiring practices for adults who just want to work a couple hours in the morning or only do a lunch shift.
Solomon added that the district created small cards with QR codes that refer to a website with school nutrition staffing benefits and openings that are then handed out by nutrition employees to help recruit people in the community.
Even when a district is fully staffed, it’s important to keep looking ahead three, six, nine and 12 months down the road, she added. “Sometimes, we get to a point in K-12 where we’re staffed, and we back away from it and you can’t. You have to stay staffing.”
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