District looks for answers to negative food-service account balances

How much should a school district push to collect food service debts?

A discussion at last week’s Newton Community School District Board of Education meeting was about tens of thousands of dollars, but it briefly expanded into some moral and time-management questions.

A report from Food Services Supervisor Cristy Croson about delinquent accounts included numbers on how much is owed to the district on food-service accounts, and what is being done to collect payments. She gave an overview of the district’s outstanding debts when it comes to food service fees charged to parents of students, and began by detailing the small progress made by an outside collection agency.

In March of 2015, the board voted 5-1 to approve Transworld Systems as an outside service to provide help in recovering past-due account balances. At that time, Croson said were 44 family accounts for students that have left the district, totaling about $7,200, and a total of $25,000 of active accounts that have balances of $500 or more.

Since districts receive federal money for their nutritional programs, those accounts cannot run a negative balance.

Last week, Croson said of the 86 accounts the district sent to Transworld, totaling about $42,000, and only “collected up about 12 accounts,” erasing about $7,500 of the debt.

“Many of the overdue accounts are from families whose students are no longer in the district,” Croson said. “So even Transworld has trouble finding a current address for some of them.”

Croson said families who have gone from fully paid to either free or reduced meals are often the accounts that go unpaid, as the student’s family signed up for assistance due to low household income. She said her primary concern is accounts with balances of $500 or more.

Transworld still has $34,000 worth of overdue Newton accounts on its hands. Croson said there has been a new debt of $27,000 run up in the district from accounts just since the beginning of the 2015-16 school year in August.

Director of Business Services Gayle Isaac and Board President Sheri Benson both said it isn’t usually practical to pursue small-claims court action against parents, especially those who have left the district.

Croson said crowdfunding, using websites such as GoFundMe, was the course of action recommended by those in the school food service business. She received no objections from the board to starting a crowdfunding account to help reduce balances of some accounts.

The Newton Daily News wasn’t able to discover any crowdsourcing food-service accounts specific to Newton schools by presstime.

Newton Schools allows every student to charge meals, no matter what is owed, but policies on whether to serve students food no matter what is owed on their accounts varies greatly around Iowa and the U.S. In the Mason City School District, students can continue to receive regular meals until their funds hit negative $15.

Discussions about Newton’s rising food service debt go back at least as far as the spring of 2006, when the debt was only $11,000.

There are more than 1,500 children on free or reduced-price lunch among the approximate 2,950 students enrolled in the district — a ratio that has doubled since the year 2000.

Contact Jason W. Brooks at 641-792-3121 ext. 6532 or jbrooks@newtondailynews.com