National shortages affecting Baldwin-Whitehall school district

National shortages are now impacting local school districts in more ways than one.

School districts continue to struggle to get bus drivers, but now those shortages are hitting the lunch room.

One district is reporting that food delivery orders have gone unfulfilled twice this week. The Baldwin-Whitehall School District Manager Mark Cherpak said it only received one food delivery out of three on Monday and none on Wednesday, so it was a scramble to make that one shipment work for all the schools.

“The shortages are a domino effect, and hitting us from the distributor side to the delivery side,” Cherpak said.

The district said it still can provide lunch for its 5,000 students, but these deliveries that could change and parents may be forced to pack lunch.

Cherpak said distributors are having problems getting products to make food, and then there are no truck drivers to get the food to the schools.

“We are basically changing menus on the fly. The menus that are distributed to the students are pretty much null and void now, because we are just trying to get anything in the building to feed the kids,” he said. “It’s very stressful on them in the morning when a truck doesn’t show up on what we are going to do that day and the next couple days, so we have people transporting food from the buildings that have it to the buildings that don’t have it.”

Cherpak said the distributors hope this is a short-term problem but it’s unclear if there will be food shipments coming to the schools next week. In the meantime, the district is asking parents to be patient and pack their lunch if they can until the supply chain problems are resolved.

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