For the past two years, the Bellevue School District has allocated more of its food budget to buy from farmers across Washington to offer students meals with locally produced raspberries, blueberries and coho and chum salmon.
The Local Food for Schools program, a federal program that funneled $8.8 million to Washington, played a crucial role in helping 160 districts, including Bellevue, boost the amount of fresh produce and locally grown meat, poultry and seafood they served students.
But, earlier this month, the Trump administration canceled the program, leaving school nutrition staff in the Eastside district and across the state scrambling to revise their menus and determine which local foods they can still buy without the federal funding.
In Washington alone, Local Food for Schools helped feed 850,000 students.
Nationwide, the U.S. Department of Agriculture slashed roughly $660 million in funding for the Local Foods For Schools and child care centers. The move was part of a $1 billion cut from two programs that helped schools, food banks and child care centers cover the cost of locally produced fresh foods.
Before the funding cut, the state was due to receive another $8.8 million over the next three fiscal years for the program.
“I was holding out hope,” said Leanne Eko, Chief Nutrition Officer at the State Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction. “The current administration speaks to their support of American agriculture and that is absolutely what this program does so I was hopeful that maybe it would continue to be supported.”
While the Bellevue district and 136 other Washington districts decided to still participate and pay full price for the food, 23 districts won’t participate in the program next school year.
“It’s a shame,” said Jaime Matisons, the food service director at Aberdeen School District, a 3,300-student district in Western Washington that had to drop out of the program. “I just knew because of the cost that there would be no way we could participate without the funding.”
Aberdeen received $12,000 in federal money this school year to purchase frozen blackberries grown in Puyallup, frozen raspberries grown in Everson, Whatcom County, and dried cherries from Mesa, Franklin County. If they were to continue, they would have to pay $24,000 for those berries, along with warehousing and shipping costs.
The dried cherries came in small packages perfect for sack lunches and the berries went into parfaits served for breakfast, Matisons said.
“The kids loved those,” Matisons said.
The USDA created the program to counter supply chain and food shortages that schools experienced during the pandemic.
During the 2023-24 school year, schools received locally produced food for free. For the current school year, schools paid a small processing fee for food. In December, the program offered districts the option to buy from farmers at a 50% discount next school year.
While the federal government never intended for the program to go on forever, the abrupt funding cut has put districts in a pickle.
Districts across the state are already managing tight budgets as they grapple with the loss of federal pandemic aid, inflation and the rising cost of providing special education services for students. As many school boards weigh potential layoffs and program cuts, some schools won’t have the money to pay for the produce without federal or state support.
Wendy Weyer, director of nutrition services for the Bellevue School District, decided to continue purchasing beef stew meat, pork shoulder, and frozen raspberries and blueberries for next year, but it will cost the district an additional almost $13,000. The raspberries will cost the district $108 a case rather than $54.
This menu change comes when the district must slash $20 million from its budget. The School Board has approved plans to lay off more than 100 employees, including central office staff, assistant principals, counselors and teachers.
“We work in the world of pennies,” said Wendy Weyer, the director of nutrition services for the Bellevue schools. “Every few pennies we can add to our program helps us to continue to provide high-quality food for our students.”
Spokane Public Schools decided to keep local cherries as a special item on lunch menu but will no longer buy local blueberries; instead, they are buying them from a different state to keep prices down, said Ellen Ramus, the district’s supervisor of nutrition services.
“It’s pretty disappointing just because I was very excited about the direction we were headed with the LFS program and the potential for more (local products) to be available in the future,” Ramus said.
While OSPI is committed to continuing the program for the state, Eko worries that fewer school districts will buy local food after the federal funding cut. Because the state buys in bulk from local farmers and then distributes the foods to schools, OSPI needs a base number of orders from districts to make an order even possible.
In the first year of Local Food for Schools, Rowley and Hawkins Fruit Farms sold half a million pounds of tart cherries and 16,000 pounds of frozen peaches and apricots to schools, bringing in about $865,000 total.
“That was a huge blessing for our farm,” one of the farm’s owners, Mark Rowley, said.
Rowley’s farm used half a million dollars of new machinery during the first year to produce and package the dried cherries. In the time since, Rowley has had to lay off five employees, a reminder of the human cost of the funding cuts.
The second year the program brought in about $155,000 worth of frozen and dried fruit. Without federal funding, the contracts for next year will only bring in between $60,000 and $65,000 worth of fruit.
“It was unfortunate,” Rowley said.
Rowley said the federal government shouldn’t cover costs that school districts can shoulder.
“I believe that our country needs to cut costs and spending and this I think is going to be a smart move overall,” Rowley said.
However, he remains hopeful that school districts will find ways to continue ordering from local farms like his.
“Schools should be purchasing from local sources,” Rowley said. “Especially in Washington, where we grow and produce so much.”
The state Department of Agriculture offers grants to school districts to purchase food produced in Washington through its Farm to School program, but its future is uncertain. The program used to be funded by a mix of state and federal money, but due to the recent USDA budget cuts, it will be solely funded by the state’s general fund.
With the state facing an estimated budget shortfall of $15 billion over the next four years, the program could be on the chopping block.
Under Farm to School, grant recipients have more control over which products they purchase, said Daniel Schafer, communications administrator at the agency.
However, finding local farmers and securing procurement contracts is not easy. It requires a significant amount of time and resources that many school districts simply do not have, said Eko, the chief nutrition officer at OSPI.
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