For the second year in a row, the Hawaii Youth Correctional Facility has been given approval to spend up to $80,000 purchasing last-minute meals at Zippy’s and L&L Hawaiian Barbecue for its wards and corrections officers, an expense that highlights the facility’s persistent staffing issues.

The facility has only two cooks and the kitchen has been understaffed for two years, operations manager Darrell Bueno said. With no prospects for a third employee, HYCF’s two cooks work up to seven days a week to feed the estimated 22 juveniles and five to seven corrections officers housed there on any given day.

“It’s definitely a constant battle to keep trying to fill positions,” Bueno said. Staffing has been an issue since he joined HYCF 22 years ago, he said.

Administrator Mark Patterson says that the facility’s hiring process makes it difficult to fill the kitchen’s vacant position. The process can take anywhere from six to nine months, largely because of the extensive background checks required for staff members working directly with youth.

“By the time the investigation is complete and all the requirements in terms of background checks are met, the individual found another job, then we have to go through that whole process again,” Patterson said. “So it’s very frustrating for us.”

Running an understaffed kitchen has not been easy for employees, Patterson said. The two cooks typically work eight-hour shifts, with the morning cook starting at around 5 a.m. and the evening cook finishing up around 7 p.m. Their shifts overlap for a few hours, but they spend the remaining time running the kitchen alone.

Bueno said it’s not unusual for cooks to work overtime, although staff members are increasingly passing on overtime opportunities.

“They have families, they have home lives, they have children,” he said. “They sacrificed that for a good stretch of time, and I think it gets to a point where they got to start paying attention to their personal lives.”

Bueno described the cooks as burned out, saying that they are often on their feet for the entire day in order to make breakfast, lunch and dinner and prepare future meals.

When cooks step out last minute or take the day off, the facility sometimes gives wards and corrections officers something simple, like cereal and milk. Without proper food service credentials, though, Bueno says that it’s not easy for non-cook staff members to prepare hot meals.

Instead, with employees stepping out more and more frequently and the kitchen struggling to fill its vacant role, the facility is increasingly resorting to emergency meals, which are typically ordered from restaurant chains like L&L Hawaiian Barbecue and Zippy’s.

In years when HYCF’s kitchen is fully staffed, Patterson says the facility requests $20,000 to $35,000 for these emergency meals. Now, that number has more than doubled, reflecting the severity of the facility’s staffing shortage.

HYCF’s staffing issues aren’t limited to its kitchen. While the facility doesn’t have a staffing problem with its correctional staff, Bueno says there are still multiple vacancies in other areas, including groundskeeper, maintenance and office positions.

“I’ve been in this position since 2018,” he said. “I can tell you that I’ve never had a full operational staff.”

Patterson says that the pay may factor into this shortage by deterring people from applying, although Bueno feels that the intensive hiring process is the main concern.

“I really think that there needs to be ways to streamline it, to make it more efficient,” he said.