School Meal Programs

In fiscal year 1997, the Agriculture Department (USDA) will provide more than $6 billion in cash reimbursements and more than $600 million in commodities to the two largest school meal programs. Although USDA regulates and oversees the school meal programs, the states and local school food authorities have flexibility in purchasing, distributing, and preparing the food that is served to students. Some states and local school food authorities have developed unique and innovative approaches to help run these programs more efficiently. To learn how these "best practices" might apply to the school meal programs, this report (1) identifies state and local school food authority operating practices that are generally recognized as best practices by USDA, states, and other officials; (2) determines whether some of these best practices could be replicated by other states and local school food authorities; and (3) reviews the training and technical assistance that USDA provides to the states and local school food authorities to help them better manage the school meal programs. GAO reviews two best practices in depth--Pennsylvania's computerized system for ordering commodities from USDA and Texas' use of the Defense Department's commodity purchasing infrastructure to buy fresh fruits and vegetables.

GAO noted that: (1) states and SFAs have developed a number of best practices to improve the management and operation of the school meal programs, including the use of: (a) a computerized system to improve the efficiency of the commodity-ordering process; and (b) cooperative purchasing programs to buy food and nonfood items at competitive prices; (2) in addition, USDA has implemented a pilot project that uses the Department of Defense's (DOD) nationwide infrastructure to purchase fresh produce and improve the nutritional content of school meals; (3) USDA and other officials believe that the best practices identified could be replicated by some states and school food authorities to help improve the management and operation of the school meal programs nationwide; (4) however, some impediments would first have to be overcome before these best practices could be adopted; (5) the successful implementation of a computerized system would first require the establishment of an effective commodity-ordering and -processing network that links commercial brokers and processors, SFAs, and the state's commodity-distributing agency; (6) similarly, if other states and SFAs wanted to purchase a wider variety of higher-quality fresh fruits and vegetables at competitive prices by using DOD's commodity-purchasing infrastructure under a USDA pilot project, their participation might be limited by the $20-million cap on federal commodity funds available for this USDA project; (7) moreover, not all best practices may be suitable for all states and SFAs because of such factors as the size and location of the state school food authority; (8) USDA's recent training and technical assistance efforts for the school meal programs have largely focused on providing information about the new dietary guidelines to school food service personnel; (9) because USDA's training and technical assistance resources are limited, USDA has had few resources available for training and assisting states in managing and operating the school meal programs more efficiently and economically; and (10) past efforts to improve the management and operation of school meal programs, such as the best practices awards program that operated during fiscal years 1992 through 1994, have either been eliminated or reduced because of other competing priorities for resources.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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