Lindsay Woods, the cook manager at Petrova Elementary School in the Saranac Lake Central School District, pours dozens of cups of milk on Tuesday for students to drink the next day. Petrova cafeteria staff started individually pouring milks this week as a shortage of milk cartons has made some schools need to start buying dairy in bulk. (Enterprise photo — Aaron Marbone)

SARANAC LAKE — As Petrova Elementary School students lined up for the buses to take them home on Tuesday, staff inside the cafeteria set to work filling and capping dozens of cups of milk to be served at breakfast the next morning.

Cook Manager Lindsay Woods, food service employee Barb Ohmann and others have started doing this every day as a shortage of the half-pint wax cardboard milk cartons ubiquitous in school cafeterias is sweeping the nation.

“Lunch ladies can’t seem to get a break these days,” Saranac Lake Central School District School Lunch Manager Ruth Pino said on Monday.

That evening, the district was down to its last three crates, which hold 50 cartons each.

“It will be gone by (the end of) breakfast (Tuesday) morning,” Pino said.

Students are still getting milk. Pino had to start ordering it in gallon jugs, though.

In the middle and high school, there’s now a big pitcher where students can grab cups and pour their own. But for the elementary schoolers, cafeteria workers are putting the milk in cups with lids to avoid milk “disasters.”

This creating a lot of extra work. School-age children drink a lot of milk. At Petrova, which saw 275 students get lunch at the cafeteria on Tuesday, Woods said they serve around 250 milks a day — that’s 16 gallons of dairy.

On Fridays — pizza, chocolate milk and dessert day — food service worker Kelli Hammond said they are much busier. Woods said they serve closer to 360 lunches on Fridays. Hammond said they’ve had to start buying chocolate milk in bulk, too.

Now they’ve got to pour and cap 250 milks a day. This is extra time and an extra workload.

Pino said just when everyone got into their rhythm in the cafeteria, now they’ve got to veer off to pour milks.

“I wasn’t here during all of the COVID stuff, so this is my first curve since I’ve been here,” Woods said.

She’s rolling with the punches.

Pino got a call from the state Education Department three weeks ago asking if they were experiencing shortages. At the time, she said the question surprised her. They were all good. But then on Oct. 26, the district’s distributor, called to say they’d be out of it by the next Friday, which is what happened.

Lake Placid Central School District Superintendent Timothy Seymour said Lake Placid schools already switched to bulk milk at the start of the year as part of an initiative to reduce the district’s carbon footprint. So the shortage has not impacted the middle-high school yet, where milk is dispensed by a machine into cups.

He said if the shortage becomes a problem at the elementary school, they’ll do what SLCSD is doing.

“Stewart’s is our milk supplier and we do not currently have an issue,” Tupper Lake Central School District Superintendent Russ Bartlett said. “I am, however, offering our sincere thoughts and prayers for those impacted in this time of crisis.”

“It’s great that this is the thing that is currently consuming school news,” Bartlett said. “It could be so much worse.”

Woods said they have no idea how long this will last.

“I heard into early 2024, but I’m not 100% sure,” she said.

Right now there are whisperings and rumors they hear from the delivery truck drivers, but nothing definitive. Woods is sure once the cafeteria staff get used to buying bulk milk, that’s when the cartons will come back.

The exact cause of the shortage is not currently clear. The industry publication Packaging Dive points to people in the packaging industry identifying low supply from the the Illinois-based Pactiv Evergreen as being a potential cause.

The Cream-O-Land Dairies company has a statement on its website that says Pactiv Evergreen is “experiencing major production issues” and delivering less than 50% of that company’s weekly need for cartons.

Last week, Pactiv Evergreen told news outlets that it “continues to face significantly higher than projected demand” for these milk cartons.

North Country Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-Willsboro, weighed in on Nov. 3, expressing her concern and lauding schools like SLCSD that are finding ways to keep milk in schools.

“I am deeply concerned about the milk carton shortage that threatens to remove our children’s access at school to nutritious milk essential for their healthy development,” Stefanik said in a statement. “I applaud our upstate schools that have quickly adapted to serving our students by purchasing milk by the gallon to serve individually to ensure our kids have uninterrupted access to a proper nutritious meal as this milk carton shortage persists.”