Polson BOE learns about lunch and high school roof
POLSON — If the only complaint about school lunch is the long line, something is being done right.
At Monday's Polson Board of Education meeting, student representative YEAR Tyler Krell said during his report that the wait time for lunch was the only real complaint he has heard.
“The new program has gone over well,” he said. “The next thing is to get it moving faster. It's a good program. I like it. Now we are just working on homecoming.”
Polson added a grab-and-go option this year
Jim Steiner expanded on the lunch program and said that they serve up to 250 students some days.
“Our lunch program serves more meals than any other business in this community,” Superintendent David Whitesell said.
One of the main reasons for the long wait time is that many students don't know what's for lunch when they get up to the ticket taker.
“We have signs everywhere and boards everywhere,” Steiner said. “We're really trying to speed that up with more boards and menus posted.”
As the weather changes, Steiner said the lunch room might see more students staying in for lunch.
“It's either that or they have spent all their money already,” he said.
With five different thing on the grab-and-go menu, each day provides something different in addition to the new salad bar. The menu offers more whole grain things, such as bread, pasta and tortilla.
“We're trying it make it healthier,” he said.
A goal is to have nutritional information on the lunch menus in October.
Whitsell said that Steiner does a good job and won the Support Staff of the Year award last year for his hard work.
“There's always going to be that stigmatism that goes along with school lunch,” Whitesell said. “Jim's done a good job working on those things.”
“I'm proud to be the lunch dude,” he said. “I have a great food service staff. They work hard day in and day out.”
In other news, the board discussed ways to try and finance a new high school roof. After applying for many grants and not getting any, Whitesell suggested that the board start to look at other options.
“This is getting past the first step of writing grants and not finding any,” he said. “We need to move up the tree. The low hanging fruit is not working, we need to start working our way up the tree.”
Other options include low or zero interest loans and general obligation bonds.
The only option Whitesell said the district doesn't have is to continue with the current roof.
Currently, the roof actually contains two roofs. Montana law says the school can have three roofs. The first roof, built in the 1970s, consists of corrugated steel on top of a concrete base. The second roof is a membrane over foam on top of the steel.
The general idea of how to fix the roof is to take off the top membrane and foam layers, leaving the corrugated steel and concrete layers.
The layers have been cleared for asbestos, but if another membrane is added as a third roof, mold will become a concern with the moisture that has already accumulated on the roof, Whitesell said.
“I would encourage you to get this project rolling,” he said.
The best way to fix the roof would be to leave the first roof and tear off the foam and membrane and replace it with insulation and put a new membrane on top.
A timeline for this project does depend on its finances, but the board doesn't have to wait until summer, Whitesell said. He is going to get more numbers so the council can get an idea for financing the project.
If the board decided to put a levy out, it wouldn't be on the November election, as that is too soon.
One option is to have a loan from the Montana Board of Investments, where the maximum loan is 90 percent of the general fund. For Polson, that is $804,000. Payments for that is over 10 years at about $102,118 each year.
Another option is to take an IMPACT loan, which is a zero percent interest program that requires voters' approval.