By now, everyone has seen the countless news stories: supply chain issues, labor shortages, increasing labor costs, increasing lumber and material costs and ships stuck out for miles at Long Beach harbor in Southern California. Ships filled with furniture and goods from Asia have been sitting for months, or even years before being unloaded. But now, as we start the 3rd year of the COVID-19 pandemic, supply chain shortages are hitting Parker students closer to home.

The Parker community is facing shortages of things needed for activities. Everything from food supplies to medical supplies and wood and other raw materials. These shortages are affecting cafeteria food, COVID testing, and stage work for the musical.

Like Parker, other school cafeterias across the country are facing shortages of their own. Cafeteria managers across the country are forced to make some hard decisions on food service supply shortages. Some of them chose to substitute with what might be available at big box stores like Costco, while others are forced to offer only a few choices of items. Others are also often forced to reduce the quality of food offered. While Parker has not purchased food from Costco, Chef Zac Maness said he was “making more trips to the Big Apple than usual.” He also confirmed that Parker is “having trouble sourcing packaged and prepared foods,” and that these shortages are affecting the Lower School snack menu a lot, as chips are hard to find.

For some schools, even the frozen food orders are falling weeks behind schedule. In some Virginia school districts, waffles and pancakes have been unavailable for months, and schools think the problem is getting worse now that so many packaged food workers are out of work due to the new COVID variant.

According to Maness, some schools are having a hard time finding prepared foods like chicken nuggets and pizza, but Parker has luckily always made these items from scratch, so “we have not had to change our menu as a result.” But he said that he has not been able to source Tazo Iced Tea and Naked Juice, two favorites of Parker students, for a long time. Parker is still unable to source canned Izze drinks, so Maness has gotten creative with the beverages like Swoon.

In other areas, food may be available, but due to labor shortages, there is no one to drive the trucks and make deliveries. Maness says that this is a big issue for some of Parker’s vendors who “are having a hard time finding delivery drivers to distribute the goods.” 

Some schools are buying pizzas and hamburgers from chains but are facing increasing pressure on their food service budgets. According to some estimates, the cost of food has risen almost 7.0% since last year, and some items are much much higher, like meat, fish and eggs. Maness has agreed that food costs at Parker have increased over the past year and a half.

Like food shortages, Parker is seeing its fair share of other material shortages, like containers for meals, medical supplies and even lumber used for the spring musical. According to Nick Rupard, Parker’s woodworking teacher, lumber is essentially triple the price it was before the pandemic, which could be caused by shortages due to increased demand for wood products.

Rupard said he “could blow [his] whole budget and buy wood, but then there would be no hardware to assemble stuff, there would be no paint or stain to finish things.”

He says he has had to be more resourceful to get the supplies needed for his classes and the musical, such as buying sheets of plywood as opposed to more expensive pine or hardwood. According to Rupard, the school has not increased his budget despite lumber price increases. “For example, an eight foot long 2×4 is $9.60 … it used to be $2.40,” Rupard said.

It appears that Parker is no different from the rest of the country. Parker gets a crash course in the business of making and moving goods by having to learn about what supply chain and logistics issues mean. According to Stephen Colbert, who said in an October monologue on “The Late Show” on CBS “There is one thing that we do not have a shortage of, and that is shortages, because reportedly, America is running out of EVERYTHING!”