Cafeteria Inspections Lag, Study Finds

High school cafeterias in the District, Virginia and Montgomery County routinely fail to meet federal food safety standards that require them to be inspected twice a year, according to a study released yesterday.

D.C. school cafeterias had the worst inspection rate, an average of 0.56 times a year, among the 20 jurisdictions nationwide included in the report by the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a nutrition advocacy group. The study said Montgomery schools were examined 1.41 times a year and Virginia schools 1.76 times a year.

The report also criticized Montgomery County for having "the worst, most out-dated food code" of any system in the study. It said Montgomery's cafeteria standards are based on a 1976 federal code instead of the most recent one issued in 2005, that sets nonbinding standards for food safety inspections.

Kathy Lazor, director of food and nutrition services for Montgomery schools, disputed the report's statistics and said all high school cafeterias in the county are inspected twice a year. She also said the school system's food code is not based on 1976 standards.

"I don't know where they're getting their data from, but it's not accurate," Lazor said.

The D.C. public school system acknowledged that inspections of its cafeteria do not meet federal requirements. John White, a school system spokesman, said the District's 142 public schools were inspected 116 times in 2006, or 0.82 times a year.

Like school officials in Virginia and Montgomery, White noted that local health department employees -- not school system staff -- are responsible for inspections of school cafeterias.

Health department officials said they could not immediately comment on the study, which was based on a sample of 20 high schools in each jurisdiction, because they had not had time to review it.