School investigating cafeteria meat packaged in 2009

School officials in an East Tennessee school district are putting new protocols into place after a parent raised concerns about the meat that was being served up in school cafeterias.

One parent says the pork roast that was in the freezer was packaged in 2009.

The USDA's guidelines to ensure meat's quality and taste gives frozen meat a maximum shelf life of 13 months.

When one parent, Michael Herrell, brought up concerns about cooking with the old meat with a high school cafeteria cook, he says he was told that the cook's managers told him to smother the roast with gravy to make it taste better.

"They go to school and that might be the only meal they get all day long and it just very upsetting to me that these kids are going to school to get that meat," Herrell said.

Now the county's director of schools says the cooks will follow the USDA guidelines more closely, as well as start new procedures. Those include random inventory checks of foods stored in freezers to make sure nothing's staying in there well beyond its sell-by date. They also will be adding the delivery date along with the packaging date into the inventory list to make sure they know when the foods first arrived.

School officials say they don't know how meat that was that old was in the freezers in the first place.