Anyone who buys groceries is feeling it in the wallet. School districts are feeling the sticker shock too. In Lee County the school district serves 56,000 meals a day, so with prices up, they are forced to find new ways to save money.

The district expects to pay $1.1 million dollars more on food next school year. Meat costs are up 11%, fruits and vegetables are up 13%, bread is up 17% and milk is up a whopping 19%.

Director of Nutrition and Food Services, Wayne Nagy says, "We've done a lot of cost cutting measures especially in the labor area so we can be sure we break even by the end of the school year."

They've also reorganized workers. Nagy says, "We have more 4 hour employees...4 hour people in the morning...4 hour people in the afternoon...and combine those so we have all of our hands there in the middle of the day for serving, so that the children are being treated and served as quickly as possible."

The district also saves money by power buying, pairing up with 37 other school districts to buy food in bulk.

"So although the prices are going up 11-19 % with the foods we are buying, we should be able to stay around the 10% mark."

Students will also share part of the cost. Meals are going up a nickel.
Elementary students will pay $1.95 each day.

Middle and High School students will pay $2.20 each day.

The national average for a high school lunch is $2.88.

Nagy hopes parents will fill out their lunch form on the first day of school. Families who qualify could get free or reduced lunch, and the school district will be reimbursed for that cost.

The culprit is food prices that have rocketed higher as fuel prices rise. It's not just the zooming cost of oil and gas; food prices are also driven by demand for corn-based ethanol, worldwide demand for food and the weak dollar, among other things.
These far-flung factors have combined to put the squeeze on school kitchens, which provide free and reduced-price lunches, as well as full-price lunches, for more than half of the nation's 60 million school children.
"We are struggling to make ends meet," Katie Wilson, president-elect of the School Nutrition Association, told members of the House Education and Labor Committee on Wednesday. "We simply don't have the funds to continue on with this."
Schools can't put just anything on a child's lunch tray. Because the government subsidizes lunches, schools are expected to follow federal guidelines for healthy eating by providing lots of fresh fruit and vegetables along with whole grains.
Those are the very foods hit hardest by the rising cost of food, as are milk and meat, two universal offerings in school lunch rooms.
It costs more to make fruit and veggies in part because they are processed less, if at all, which makes it harder to spread around the cost. And it costs more to make milk and meat because they come from farm animals that eat mostly corn.
Even a one-penny increase in the cost of milk can cost the nation's schools another $54 million, said Pavel N. Matustik, chief food services administrator of the Santa Clarita Valley School in California.
The government reimburses schools $2.57 for each meals, but for many districts, the cost of a lunch is well over $3, Wilson said. The price of milk prompted Matustik to ask whether schools should even have to serve milk with every meal, a question he acknowledged would get him in trouble with the nation's dairy farmers.
Overall, food prices are expected to rise as much as 5.5 percent this year, with a slightly bigger increase for food that people make at home and a smaller increase for food in restaurants, the Agriculture Department said. There is a dispute over how just much the booming ethanol industry is to blame for high food prices. The department has said that close to 10 percent of the increase in food prices may be due to ethanol - because it increases demand, and therefore prices, for corn as well as the price of land for other commodities. But the food industry pointed out many other global estimates saying a much larger percentage is due to ethanol. Regardless, those who testified agreed on one thing: Food prices aren't going back down. At the same time, more families will be turning to the school lunch program; the government expects an increase of about 1.5 percent. "I think the price levels we're at now are not going to go down anytime soon," said Ephraim Liebtag, an economist for the Agriculture Department.