LITTLE ROCK — Food by the item
set to cost more
The cost of individual food items sold in the school cafeterias in the Pulaski County Special School District are increasing by varying amounts, effective Monday.
District Superintendent Jerry Guess said the prices previously charged for sausage biscuits, pizza wedges and dozens of other breakfast and lunch items sold individually fell below the cost of producing them.
The district is raising the prices in the middle of the school year in response to federal government requirements, Guess said, and to minimize the amount of operating money the district will have to transfer to its food-service department this year to avoid deficit spending in that department.
School district food-service departments are supposed to be self-sustaining.
Last year the district transferred about $1 million to the food-service department and anticipates that the amount will be about half that this school year.
Prices for the traditional school plate lunches won’t change.
Additional changes are coming to the food-service department, but not as quickly. Guess said a recent study of the department by the Arkansas Department of Education concluded that staffing exceeds what is necessary for the number of students who are fed. That means the district must reduce staffing inits cafeterias beginning in the 2012-13 school year, he said.
District workers will get legal help
The Pulaski County Special School District will arrange legal representation for district employees who were recently elected by their colleagues to serve on personnel policies committees, but a final decision has not been made on who will provide that legal service, Superintendent Jerry Guess said last week.
The Pulaski Association of Classroom Teachers and the Pulaski Association of Support Staff, which are the contract bargaining agents for most district employees, sued the members of the two newly formed personnel policies committees this month in an effort to disband the groups.
Responses from those employees are due in Pulaski County Circuit Court in the first week of April.
Personnel policies committees provide advice to school boards on employee-related matters and are typically used in school districts that - unlike Pulaski County Special district - don’t engage in collective bargaining with employee unions.
Guess said existing school district policy authorizes the district to provide legal representation for the employees, even though the district is not a named defendant in the two union lawsuits. The district has an in-house attorney and regularly uses attorneys from three law firms but hasn’t decided who will represent the district in the cases at hand.
The district’s in-houselawyer position is being eliminated by the end of June as a cost-saving measure. Two other attorneys, Allen Roberts of Camden and Jay Bequette of Little Rock, are members of the district team negotiating proposed contract changes with the unions. The district’s third attorney, Sam Jones, represents the district in an ongoing federal school desegregation lawsuit.
The personnel policies committees - one for teachers and one for support staff members - are organizing at a time when the Pulaski County Special School District and its two employee unions are embroiled in negotiations on budget cuts for 2012-13.
UALR summer site for science camp
Students entering sixth, seventh and eighth grades next fall will meet an astronaut and other role models, participate in hands-on projects in technology, engineering and math, and experience college life during a two-week residential summer camp at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.
The ExxonMobil Bernard Harris Summer Science Camp is held on 20 college campuses across the country. Fifty local students will be selected to attend the camp at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, which is free and scheduled for July 8-20.
Additional information about the camp and applications are available at www.theharrisfoundation.org/sitecontent/662/university-of-arkansas———little-rock/category/466/embhssc-universities. aspx.
Arkansas, Pages 15 on 03/25/2012