Welcome to the Project Education blog.  Here you'll find information about education topics important to you.  Sometimes it will be an expanded view of stories you find on WRAL.com and WRAL TV. Other times, the information will be exclusive to this blog.

We came up with this idea after brainstorming with teachers, parents, administrators and staffers from WRAL and the Capitol Broadcasting family. We hope to better engage educators, parents and other school stakeholders through this effort.

Please send ideas to me, vcalloway@wral.com, and reporter Adam Owens, aowens@wral.com.  The two of us are excited about this new opportunity.

Now for my first post. I just did a story about how the economy is affecting school lunch prices. I had some information that couldn't fit in the story, so here are more tidbits. 

The General Assembly mandated raises for cafeteria workers.  That's good news right? Yes and no. The Legislature does not provide funding for these raises the way it does for teachers.  Child nutrition departments in public schools are supposed to be self-supporting.

Wake County's child nutrition director, Marilyn Moody, told me that in order to provide the raises, the department had to lay off some workers, make some positions part-time and freeze some vacancies. She said that was tough, but it's what they had to do.

In Johnston County, the department is seeing higher food prices reflected in other ways. 

Normally when they get bids for food from vendors, they are for a year. This year, for the first time, many of their vendors would not agree to one-year bids. They wanted a six-month bid instead. This means the cost of food from vendors is only guaranteed for six months and will likely go up. 

Also for the first time, Johnston County saw a fuel surcharge clause in their contracts with some vendors. They aren't paying a surcharge at the moment, but the vendor reserves the right to tack it on if fuel costs rise by a set amount. Maybe that won't be necessary since fuel costs have been going down the past few weeks.

Teachers are feeling the pinch too.  The husband of a teacher in Johnston County told me, "last year Johnston county's price for teachers was $2.50. This year teachers are charged a la carte, so the same meal that kids get for $2 costs teachers $4.45. That's $351 more per year, eating away roughly a third of their raise.  So the state's unfunded raises for cafeteria workers are actually being paid by the teachers, at least in Johnston county. I think teachers should pay the same price as students for the same meal."

Stay tuned.