District turns program around after students forced to skip lunch

KAPAA, Hawaii — Problems with elementary school food service have been largely corrected after Always Investigating uncovered cases of  young students at one Kauai school were forced to skip lunch.

Earlier this year, the Department of Education said it would make sure every child had enough time and enough food when it comes to lunch.

Did they put those promises into action? We flew to Kauai to make sure.

At Kapaa Elementary School, kids line up eagerly for school lunch. They’re served like clockwork, and there’s plenty to go around.

But it wasn’t always this way.

“There was a concern of the kids not getting their meals and not having enough time to finish their lunch, and nothing was happening. It had gone on for like eight months,” said Wanda Stagg, a concerned grandparent. “There was no change, so we were like, let’s see if you can investigate it and make a difference.”

So we did and here’s what we found.

The elementary school had been often running out of food. Sometimes the shortage was just one of the several items on the menu. But while they hustled to get more from the nearby high school kitchen that cooks it all, the youngest children, last on the lunchtime pecking order, sometimes had no time left to eat.

“After your report, the day after your report, things shifted immediately,” Stagg said. “Kids were no longer waiting. They had enough time to eat. They didn’t have to wait for their trays, and it was great, and it’s been that way since.”

So what had gone wrong and what changed for the better?

“When we heard about it, immediately we checked with the cafeteria manager,” said Kapaa High School principal Daniel Hamada. “I’m really confident that now that we are relooking at the numbers submitted on a daily basis. I am really confident that the staff knows what to do.”

Hamada is talking about the headcount of kids expected to buy cafeteria food on any given day. It’s kind of a moving target, thanks to taste buds.

“I don’t know about when you were going to school, but I know kids love certain type of meals, and that’s where cafeteria staff are key,” Hamada said. “They know what meals kids gravitate to, whether it’s breakfast , midmorning snack or lunch. We feed every student and no one is turned away, and we’re going to make sure we continue.”

Over on the elementary school side, estimating that count turned out to be the crucial missing piece.

“Prior to when it was reported on the news, we didn’t give them any lunch counts,” said Kapaa Elementary School principal Jason Kuloloia.

Always Investigating asked, how did they know what to give you before?

“I don’t know,” Kuloloia said. “I taught at high schools and intermediate schools in the classroom and I never did give a lunch count, so there is some kind of magic that they do to find out how many meals they’re going to serve each day.”

Technology that was sitting there all along now helps the cafeteria magicians.

“Every morning by a certain time, my office staff calls the cafeteria manager and gives them a count,” Kuloloia explained, “so that means we have to train the teachers how to use the system to get a lunch count into the system so we could get it to the high school.”

Always Investigating asked, was that a new system they had to invent or something central could help them put together?