photo by: Richard Gwin

From left, South Middle School students Amelia Vasquez and Lisa Yang, both 14, talk about their proposal to replace the use of flat trays and single-use plastic containers with sectioned trays, Thursday, June 2, 2016, at South Middle School.

When students in the Lawrence school district line up for lunch, much of their food waits for them in single-use serving dishes. For each meal, new dishes are filled and thrown away. That process is not likely to change anytime soon.

After two Lawrence middle school students calculated the amount of trash created by those containers and proposed a change, district leaders say adopting a new method would be difficult at a time when the district’s budget isn’t growing.

“As an institution, there’s room for us to improve in that area,” said school board member Shannon Kimball. “And so looking at trying to be a little more creative about how could we do that, but the real trick is what budget impacts does it have?”

As part of a project at South Middle School, students Amelia Vasquez and Lisa Yang calculated that their cafeteria alone uses more than 250,000 single-use containers or plastic bags in a school year. In May, the students presented their research to the school board and proposed that the district use segmented, reusable trays instead of flat trays with individual disposable containers. Kimball said the students’ proposal is in line with the board’s sustainability goals for the district.

“It sits within the goal that we have of developing practices and procedures that make our district more sustainable in terms of our impact on the environment and that’s very important,” Kimball said.

But the district hasn’t made much progress on that front. The district’s cafeterias have used single-use containers in some capacity for at least 20 years for a variety of reasons, such as controlling portion sizes and minimizing staffing and labor costs in school cafeterias, according to Paula Murrish, the district’s director of food services and purchasing. The district spends approximately $50,000 per year on single-use containers, which amounts to less than 1 percent of its total budget, according to Murrish.

“We could consider purchasing washable plates and bowls to replace disposables,” Murrish said via email. “This would require increasing the Food Service budget for labor, the purchase of plates and bowls, and additional annual replacement costs.”

Kimball explained that controlling portion size is important because the school lunch program is federally subsidized, and the meals served by the school district have to meet specific nutrition guidelines. Kimball echoed Murrish’s concern that using reusable serving dishes instead of throwaway containers would require additional dishwashing staff that would be difficult to pay for.

photo by: Richard Gwin

Shannon Kimball

Kimball said though the district has industrial-sized dishwashers, staff would still need to load and unload the dishes.

“We go to more things that we have to wash and reuse, that means we need more people to do the work, and those are hard-to-fill positions,” Kimball said. “…There has to be somebody whose job it is to do that.”

Historically, some of those jobs are likely to sit empty. Murrish said that food services currently has 14 open positions — including entry-level positions such as dishwashing — and averaged 12 vacant positions last year.

“For example, both dishwashing positions at South Middle School are vacant, including one position that was vacant all of last year,” Murrish said.

Despite those challenges, Kimball doesn’t think that means nothing can be done to reduce the amount of waste created by school cafeterias and by the district as a whole. Last school year, the board set a goal to begin developing a long-range sustainability plan to addresses district operations and facilities.

“I don’t foresee that we would do (the students’ proposal) this next year, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t other steps that we could take that would be budget neutral to reduce our cafeteria waste and improve what we’re doing,” Kimball said. “And that I think is the kind of conversation the board would definitely be interested in having.”

Though progress wasn’t made on the board’s sustainability goal this past school year, Kimball said she thinks it will continue to be a goal next year. The board sets more than a dozen specific goals each year and is set to begin discussing its goals for the upcoming school year in August.

“When we have that discussion at goal setting, I imagine that it will include discussing what are we doing, how can we improve upon it,” Kimball said. “I was very impressed with the work the students did and I think they have a very good point.”