WALES — It may be a lunch tab like no other: four years, $410,382.

That’s how much debt the school lunch program has built up since 2009, says RSU 4 Superintendent Jim Hodgkin.

The central office has sent bills to Sabattus, Litchfield and Wales for the first $101,000, racked up when the towns belonged to School Union 44, before they formed a regional school unit, Hodgkin said.

This winter, the school board will grapple with how to ask for the rest. It might not be easy.

Litchfield Town Manager Mike Byron calls what he received in October “the bombshell invoice.”

“(Selectmen) were just flabbergasted,” Byron said. “When I let them know there’s another $300,000 that has to be dealt with, that’s going to be interesting to see their reaction to that.”

Sabattus’ position on that first bill: It doesn’t owe a thing, Town Manager Andrew Gilmore said Tuesday.

“How we break that (remaining $300,000) up, we’ll have more conversations with them,” Hodgkin said. “Whether or not the debt has to be paid and whether or not the taxpayers in RSU 4 have to pay it is really not disputable.”

According to the school, an audit of 2009 shows Sabattus owes $51,905; Litchfield, $37,086; and Wales, $11,927 for that year, based on student counts and a shared portion of Oak Hill High School. Those are the amounts the schools’ lunch programs ran over, Hodgkin said, and weren’t billed out at the time.

“There were just so many things going on with reorganization, merging the contracts, things that were huge in numbers, that it just didn’t get addressed,” he said.

Over the next three years, the RSU 4 lunch program ran over-budget again and again: In 2010, it was over by $130,115. In 2011, $82,497. In 2012, $96,850.

Business Manager Scott Eldridge said he could not say how this school year looks.

Hodgkin said a “myriad of factors” contributed to the total, including kitchen staff under different contracts, schools serving different menus, families who don’t pay students’ lunch tabs, expenses going up and students buying less. Student revenue was down $20,000 last year, Eldridge said.

“I know some people will look at this and say that’s a very bad business model,” Hodgkin said. “Unfortunately, we’re not in the restaurant business; we’re in the education business. If we were a restaurant, we’d probably be going out of business, and so would 95 percent of the schools in the state of Maine.”

School lunch programs chronically lose money, he said.

Byron, the Litchfield town manager, agreed.

“It’s a program that typically runs in the red, so that is not a surprise,” he said. The surprise was in getting a bill three years after the fact.

School officials will meet with Litchfield selectmen Tuesday and could vote afterward to fold the $37,086 into the upcoming budget.

“I don’t know what our portion is of the $300,000,” Byron said. “It’s got to be at least $100,000. That becomes more of a financial issue.”

Sabattus officials haven’t met with school administrators but plan to soon.

“We need to sit down and go through their audit figures and our audit figures,” Gilmore said. “We need to understand, make sure, literally and figuratively, we are working off the same page.”

He wonders if the lunch program has run over but other budget items have run under, zeroing out in the end.

“Certainly carrying such a large number of a deficit, I would think, would have (made the RSU) run into other financial cash-flow problems in the near term and not four years later,” Gilmore said. “The RSU budget is much larger than ours but I know the town wouldn’t be able to carry a deficit half that large without serious cash-flow issues.”

Wales officials could not be reached for comment.

Hodgkin said the RSU hired a part-time consultant two years ago to find lunch program efficiencies and trim expenses, and he did that. The position was eliminated this year. Contracts have been consolidated and menus aligned, and there’s now group purchasing. School lunch prices have increased two years in a row and one kitchen position has been cut.

More savings might still be found, Hodgkin said.

Eldridge said the district is reaching out to parents to get its free and reduced lunch enrollment up, increasing reimbursements from the state. Current enrollment is at about 50 percent.

“It’s going to be a huge challenge” going forward, Hodgkin said. “(The towns) are going to expect two things from us. The first priority is to try to make sure the program runs as close to the black as possible so we stop increasing debt. Once we have that done, we’re going to have to figure out how much we might be able to add to the budget each year to pay it down.”

The RSU has been able to carry the debt by temporarily having room in accounts such as teachers’ summer salaries, but, “obviously that’s not a good way to run a business,” Hodgkin said.

One option being considered to raise revenue: serving breakfast and potentially lunch at two to-be-named schools next summer, which would trigger state money, Eldridge said.

That, and how to split the $300,000 debt, will come before the school board in the future.

kskelton@sunjournal.com