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BOE plans for 101,700 drinks
by Gregory R. Norfleet · News · August 28, 2014


Roughly 920 West Branch pupils and school staff will down approximately 101,700 cafeteria drinks in the coming school year.


And the Board of Education last month awarded Anderson Erickson a contract to provide those drinks, from juice to milk, at a cost of about $22,900.

The school district received two bids for milk and juice, with a second bid coming from Prairie Farms, which asked for $23,300.

The top drink: half pints of chocolate skim milk. The school district predicts diners will consume 63,000 cartons during 180 school calendar days.

Second is 1 percent white milk, at 27,000 cartons, less than half of chocolate totals.

Orange juice comes in third at 9,000 cartons, with skim milk coming in last at about 2,700 cartons.

Anderson Erickson bid 23.2 cents for each carton of chocolate milk, or about $14,600 of the total.

Anderson Erickson included an escalator clause stating that prices “are subject to change based on price changes from our suppliers.”

Other school board bids approved in July and August:

• Accepted a bid from ITP to install additional WiFi in Hoover Elementary at a cost of nearly $19,400. Superintendent Kevin Hatfield said that four areas of the school have little to no WiFi to support the use of iPads and iPods in the classrooms.

The school board opted to not install WiFi for the gymnasium, at Hatfield’s recommendation.

“I don’t see it as a study environment,” the superintendent said.

He noted that two areas are the music and art rooms, which Board President Kathy Knoop noted are on the first floor of the section of Hoover Elementary which has a second floor.

Board member Mike Owen noted that the WiFi bids were not listed on the original board agenda and the bids were not included in the board packet, causing him to question if the board should vote on the bids.

Hatfield noted that he wanted to get the work done prior to the start of school and avoid calling another school board meeting.

“This is stretching the limits of an ‘emergency,’” he said, referring to one of the exceptions provided in state open meetings laws. “This is not something we want to practice.”

• Accepted bids from AgVantage FS for diesel and Consumers Co-op for unleaded gasoline. AgVantage bid $3.149 per gallon for diesel while Cedar County Co-op bid $3.145, but Hatfield said that AgVantage won the bid last year and has tanks already in place, so changing to a new supplier would mean paying about $4,175 a year to purchase and install a new tank or $1,500 a year to lease one.

Consumers Co-op did not bid on diesel. Its bid on unleaded was $2.90 per gallon, beating Cedar County Co-op’s $2.969 and AdVantage’s $2.968.