Woodbridge Schools To Announce New School Lunch Provider Friday

WOODBRIDGE, NJ — The Board of Education will convene a special meeting at 1 p.m. this Friday where the district will announce the new school lunch vendor for Woodbridge public schools.

This comes after a very tumultuous start to the school year, where dozens of Woodbridge schoolchildren said they were being served school lunches that were frozen, moldy or expired.

All through the month of September, students snapped photos of their school breakfasts and lunches, which showed turkey sandwiches and oranges frozen solid; brown, mushy celery sticks and apple slices, and milk that was actually turning into solid chunks in its container.

In other instances, the free breakfasts and lunches contained very small amounts of food, said the mothers of some students.

Chartwells is the company that had the contract to supply food to Woodbridge schools. On Sept. 23, a Chartwells representative was called to the floor of a school board meeting to explain what went wrong. Dozens of parents and even students spoke at that meeting, saying the food they had been given was inedible and even made some children sick.

On Oct. 1, the district decided to terminate Chartwells' contract.

The new Woodbridge schools food vendor will be announced by the Board at 1:00 p.m. this Friday in a public meeting held in Conference Room A of the Administration Building at 428 School Street.

Chartwells currently has the contract to provide school breakfast/lunches for about 107 school districts in New Jersey.

However, there were two big changes made to school lunch in New Jersey this year, as thousands of kids returned to the classroom full time for the first time since last March:

• The Murphy administration made all breakfasts and lunches free, for all kids, saying that all families suffered financially due to coronavirus job losses and lockdowns.
• At the beginning of the 2021 school year, most NJ schools decided to stop serving hot lunches. Lunches were changed to be "grab and go," pre-packaged food that children can eat individually, by themselves, to reduce the risk of spreading coronavirus. This was due to space restrictions placed in school cafeterias by the CDC, shorter lunch periods and having fewer students in the cafeteria at a time.

To choose a new food vendor, the Woodbridge school district put together an "evaluation committee" made up of current food service workers, central office and building administrators, teachers, BOE members and parents, said superintendent Dr. John Massimino.

Stay tuned for Friday.

Initial Patch report: Woodbridge Schools Investigate 'Moldy, Rotten' Kids' Lunch Issues (Sept. 17)

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