The state Department of Education hasn’t made any progress in a mandate to source more of the food it serves from local farmers.
Act 175, a state law passed in 2021, has mandated the DOE to locally source 30% of the food it serves by the end of the decade. The department is required to provide a progress report to the state Legislature every year.
An October report to lawmakers said that the department bought $64.1 million worth of food from July 2022 through June 2023. Of that, it reported that 6.1% was spent on locally produced food — a slight step back from the 6.3% it reportedly bought from local farmers from January to October 2022.
Since being given the 30% mandate, the DOE has said that local farmers can’t reliably provide enough food for the 100,000 meals it serves daily. It again attributed the lack of supply to its inability to source more food locally.
“Limiting factors included chronic but familiar difficulties that impact availability of local agricultural products such as invasive species, theft, labor shortages, lack of capital, and climate change. The Department recognizes the impact of climate change on our farmers, where heat and decreased rainfall, or flooding surface water, have reduced yields,” the DOE said in its report.
It also said an extended vacancy in its Farm to School coordinator position left the department without a dedicated worker “to engage with local farmers, ranchers, processors, and distributors,” which also contributed to the backward progress.
The department filled that position in August 2023.
The DOE said in its report that it planned to source 10% of its food locally by the start of this year. The department did not say if it accomplished that, but in a statement laid out its plans to improve its procurement of local food.
"HIDOE has implemented several key strategies: the development of a regional kitchen model, commencing with a central facility in the Leilehua-Mililani-Waialua Complex Area; the streamlining of procurement processes; and the implementation of Good Agricultural Practices (GAP) certification requirements for all produce suppliers, effective for the 2025-26 academic year," the department's statement said.
State Rep. Amy Perruso, who’s been public about her disappointment with DOE’s lack of progress in sourcing more local food, said she’s “unsurprised” that this year’s report shows more of the same.
She’s also unsure if the department will actually be able to reach its 30% local food goal by 2030. That’s because she and other Farm to School supporters don’t believe in the DOE’s plan to use commercialized kitchens to reach its goal.
“ I think what's happening is the department is putting all of its eggs, so to speak, in the singular basket of a centralized kitchen for the DOE, and there are multiple problems with adopting that kind of approach,” Perruso said.
She said that the DOE has had issues completing projects, casting doubt on whether it could pull off the construction of centralized kitchens. Over the last several years it’s had trouble spending hundreds of millions of dollars in capital improvement funds before they lapsed.
Some have also had concerns with a centralized kitchen model, and have instead advocated for turning school kitchens into scratch kitchens and retraining DOE kitchen staff.
Supporters of scratch kitchens say they would produce healthier food, lead to region-specific menus that are more appealing to students, and support more of Hawaiʻi’s small local farmers.
“To create this expectation that they're also going to be building centralized kitchens, I think, is really unrealistic, and I think the model is flawed anyway,” she said.
Perruso, who has a background in education and has been a key figure in agriculture-related policy as a state lawmaker, plans on introducing several bills to help facilitate the DOE’s Farm to School program.
One would delegate the program’s responsibilities to complex area superintendents, and another would require the DOE to consider geographic preferences for the locally grown agricultural products it buys.
