February 14, 2014
The Honorable Thomas Vilsack
Secretary
U.S. Department of Agriculture
1400 Independence Avenue, S.W.
Washington, D.C. 20250
Dear Secretary Vilsack:
Subject: Waiver of Implementation of School Nutrition Standards
The Pennsylvania Association of School Business Officials (PASBO) and the School Nutrition
Association of Pennsylvania (SNAPa) urges you to act without delay to implement a waiver
program for local education agencies that certify they are unable to meet the new nutritional
standards for the school breakfast program or the nutritional standards for competitive foods
that go into effect in July 2014 without incurring increased costs. Congressional directives
issued pursuant to the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2014 (P.L. 113-76), including the House
Report (H. Rpt. 113-116), Senate Report (S. Rpt. 113-46) and the Explanatory Statement to the
Senate Amendment to H.R. 3547, urge the U.S. Department of Agriculture to act quickly to
develop and implement a waiver process through which state agencies could grant waivers of
these new nutritional standards to those schools that certify a financial difficulty with their
implementation.
The many recent changes to the school nutrition standards have had a critical financial impact
on school food service operations in Pennsylvania, as well as across the nation. These strict
standards regarding the content of school meals have caused a decrease in meal participation
across the nation. This declining trend will likely continue as the competitive food regulations
go into effect later this year and begin to impact the à la carte menu options available to
students.
While PASBO and SNAPa fully support the need to provide healthy school lunch options to
students, we are also keenly aware of the fact that revenue from these sales enables us to
maintain program integrity while serving high quality foods at affordable prices. Revenue
losses from decreasing sales strains our budgets, especially in school districts with low
proportions of federally reimbursed lunches. As a result, the quality of our meal programs will
deteriorate, and some schools may even drop their School Breakfast Program and School Lunch
Program participation altogether.
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As implementation of these new nutritional standards has proven to be a financial as well as
administrative challenge for our schools, flexibility in the meal program requirements is
needed. With our schools now in the process of developing their 2014-15 budgets, we urge
you to implement, as soon as possible, the recommended waiver process for those schools that
cannot yet meet these new standards in a cost-neutral manner. Doing so would ensure that
our schools are able to continue to offer healthy meals to our students, while ensuring they
have the resources to continue to operate quality meal programs.
Thank you for your attention to this very important matter.
Sincerely,
The Pennsylvania Association of School Business Officials
The School Nutrition Association of Pennsylvania
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