Parents will need to pack another nickel for Belleville District 118 lunches

Belleville District 118 school board increased lunch prices by a nickel at its monthly meeting on Tuesday. The board also agreed to spend on Chromebooks, supplemental materials and a contract with an architect.

Lunch up a nickel

Board members unanimously approved raising the school district’s full-price lunches to $1.80 for the coming school year.

It amounts to a dollar a month for one child, according to board member Dianne Zimmermann. “I think families should be able to handle that,” she said.

“The reason for the increase is to keep us moving forward in the paid lunch equity guidelines established by the federal government,” Superintendent Matt Klosterman said. “It’s going to require a gradual increase over time.”

Assistant Superintendent Ryan Boike said “we have to show (the federal government) that we are making efforts.”

Last school year, the paid lunch was $1.75. Students eligible for reduced-cost lunch will still pay 40 cents per lunch; students eligible for free lunch are also unaffected.

Other items

The board also:

▪  Agreed to O’Fallon Township High School District 203’s request to leave Belleville Area Special Services Cooperative. O’Fallon needs the other 23 districts in BAASC to agree to most easily leave the cooperative. Klosterman said they had not yet fully investigated the financial ramifications for District 118, but suspected it would increase the district’s costs by about $8,000 a year.

▪  Hired Amber Meurer as a second grade teacher at Abraham Lincoln Elementary School; last year Meurer was a paraprofessional at Union School

▪  Hired Sarah Largent, who has been a part-time teacher at the district for 10 years, for a full-time position. “It’s been a long time coming, and I’m glad it’s here,” Largent said.

▪  Hired Richard Walta as custodian at Union School in the evenings. Walta has been working within the district for more than two years, mostly at Westhaven.

▪  Approved a contract with Ittner Architects to create a master plan at a cost of $29,000. Klosterman said it was a necessary process, given the changing demands to the district’s aging school buildings and increasing enrollment.

“This will be a pretty comprehensive plan,” he said. The plan by Ittner Architects will “help us accommodate the growth we’ve experienced over the last few years; most of our buildings are pretty maxed out.”

The architects will also be exploring better uses for computer labs, which are becoming less necessary in some schools with students in third through eighth grades having Chromebooks, according to Klosterman.

▪  Spending $180,000 on supplemental curriculum materials in reading, writing and math.

Tracy Gray, assistant superintendent for curriculum, said the additional materials help all the schools share resources, because they all will have the same materials.

“When you’re in a single section building, you’re going to have a lot of people to call on,” she said.

▪  Agreed to purchase 700 Chromebooks, at a cost not to exceed $200,000 including licenses, to equip every third-grader with a device and to fill out carts that the kindergarten through second grade classrooms can use as well.

“This covers ... two additional carts and 30 Chromebooks a cart,” Klosterman said.

This story was originally published July 21, 2015 at 12:14 PM with the headline "Parents will need to pack another nickel for Belleville District 118 lunches."