In response to increasing food costs, the Yankton School District’s (YSD) child nutrition supervisor has teamed up with the nutrition supervisors in the Brandon Valley and Harrisburg school districts to cut food costs.

“I had talked about partnering with Brandon Valley for several years, but we wanted to pick up a third school, as well,” said Sandy Kramer, YSD’s child nutrition supervisor. “There was a new food director at Harrisburg, and we talked to him about it and he became very interested.”

The three child nutrition supervisors began brainstorming on the program in the fall of 2011, and decide the following spring to do their bids together. This school year was the first of the partnership.

“We figure together, we’ve spent more than about $2 million in food,” Kramer said. “YSD and Brandon Valley both saved about 3-5 percent, and Harrisburg saved a little bit more because they hadn’t done a bid before.”

The districts will again partner this year, and they are currently taking bids for food service providers. The bid opening will is set for May 17.

“We’re also looking at combining other things, including doing some staff trainings together,” Kramer said. “We could just get one speaker to come in for all of our staff members.”

She added that it has been nice to share things with the other supervisors, and the three can divide things up with the USDA food guidelines changes.

“So far, we’ve been very compatible,” Kramer said. “Each of us has had to give up something’s that we’ve liked to use, but we never give up on the quality of the product we provide. For us, it’s quality versus price.”

In addition to the benefits for the districts, the food brokers also like the partnership.

“Without the partnership, the brokers would probably come around and stop at each school to show a product,” Kramer said. “We can contact one broker and they can do all the food samplings for each district at one time.”

She said she has already been approached by superintendents, business managers and school board members from other districts about the advantages of partnering up.

“We really wanted to get a year under our belt before we began to promote the partnership and push other districts to consider it,” Kramer said. “After we get done with our bid opening in a few weeks, we will contact other schools and say they need to think about it.”

One of the reasons Kramer chose to partner up with Brandon Valley and Harrisburg is because the three district’s are similar in size and are close to each other geographically.

“We’re all on the same side of the state, and we figured with the way the trucking routes go down the interstate, we would be in a good position to partner up,” she said. “You have to take into consideration that transportation is a big cost for distributors.”

Kramer said there are a lot of schools in other states that are teaming up to cut food costs, but this is the only partnership in South Dakota.

“We may try to do trainings for some schools and educate them about the partnership and how we got started,” she said. “It’s not as difficult to get started as many districts might think it would be. Partnering up with other schools could benefit both small districts and larger ones.”

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