Schools

Will a Food Co-op Help D159 Get Better Prices?

There's been some hot talk about hot lunches recently, with D159 joining a co-op in hopes of getting better food prices. Some board members think the move was too much of a gamble.

Imagine feeding one child lunch every day, 180 days of the year.

Now imagine doing that with more than 1,500 students, like Mokena 159 must do each school year. Paying too much for one individual carton of milk times the number of students who buy school lunch, times 180 school days a year...

It's important to get a good price.

Find out what's happening in Mokenawith free, real-time updates from Patch.

The school board last week voted to join the Northern Illinois Independent Purchasing Cooperative, a group of school districts that have banded together to bid for food prices together, hopefully to get a better deal as a group than each individual district could get on its own.

"The bigger we go, the better our prices are," Micheline Piekarski of the NIIPC said.

Find out what's happening in Mokenawith free, real-time updates from Patch.

Vote Split 4-3

Board members Joe Spalla, Kathy Moore, Scott Peters and Mike Ford voted to join the group. Board President John Troy and members Pat Markham and Mark Franceschini voted against.

Markham said he wasn't convinced the co-op would help the district get a better price. He would have liked to see the full bid amounts for every item Mokena buys rather than the list of 15 to 20 food prices NIIPC provided at the district's request.

"It's taxpayer money and we really can't gamble with it," Markham said.

The 4-3 vote means Mokena must now get at least 80 percent of the food items they buy through the co-op. That's items, not amount. Milk would be considered one item, as would the less-common purchase of breakfast cereal.

The district can still buy 20 percent from other places if they find a better price there.

"We did a lot of investigation about the particular merits of the NIIPC and believe that there will be cost savings to the Mokena district and we believe there will be additional networking resources being part of the cooperative," said Kirt Hendrick, director of business operations for the district.

What Research Was Done?

The cooperative collectively buys the what makes up meals for more than 170,000 students throughout northern Illinois, Piekarski said.

"We did $18 million with our distributor last year with our purchases," she said.

In researching whether to become the 72nd school district to join the group, Mokena talked to 10 of the member districts and visited an 11th, Kankakee 111.

Every district said they had gotten better prices through the co-op than through their previous supplier, Hendrick said.

The district also asked the co-op for a list of the prices for 15 to 20 of the more common Mokena food purchases.

"There were some savings on some items but not all," Hendrick said.

That's where the 80-20 buy-in comes in, Hendrick said.

"If you have your own source that gets a better price on some things, that’s where you use up your 20 percent," he said. "When you go into typical bidding, you're obligated to purchase things through that distributor, so this actually offers more flexibility."

Also unlike buying food directly from a supplier, this is an intergovernmental agreement rather than a binding contract.

"At any time someone can basically tell us they're leaving the co-op," Piekarski said.

However, Markham said more research was needed before taking the issue to a board vote.

"We've been promised it will save us money," he said. "Well, I wouldn't want to buy a car that way."

Full Price List Available

The co-op is made up of school districts, which are governments. As such, the prices paid for all of the more than 5,000 items the co-op buys are public record, Piekarski said.

"There's the Freedom of Information Act," said Piekarski, who is herself an employee of Oak Park and River Forest High School District 200. "They could get the whole bid. They would just have to go to the school board."

Mokena 159 did not put in a Freedom of Information Act request, she said.

Hendrick said he was looking at the group's membership rules, not their Freedom of Information Act rules, when inquiring about prices.

"I had never really discussed it with (Piekarski) since we were discussing membership and as members we would have those prices available," Hendrick said.

The district is in the process of deciding whether to switch over from the current supplier to prices bid through the co-op for this school year, Hendrick said. Next year, all the students' food will be purchased through the co-op.


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