September 4, 2021

Hello Parents/Guardians,

We are excited to serve our students meals in the school building next week. Currently we are experiencing product/driver shortages for all of our food service companies we contract with. With this being said, I wanted to let you all know that our menus throughout the school district might vary a bit from school to school as we do the best we can to purchase the food we need. 

Good news: all students will eat for free this year, including the option for breakfast. USDA is allowing us to operate under a program which allows this to be possible. Students will only have to pay if they want second meals and/or snack Items (a la carte). To start the school year out we will not be operating our snack bars at the middle/high schools. We will gradually transition into this in the upcoming weeks. Our department's primary goal is to make sure that breakfast and lunch are being served as safely as possible, and that all students will have access to these meals.

At the elementary schools, students will be eating breakfast in the classrooms. Each school will have a different layout on how kids will be picking breakfast up due to the flow of student traffic. We decided that classrooms are the best way to grant access for all students since our cafeterias can not safely sit the entire school in those spaces at the same time. We are working to provide as much distancing as possible for the students who eat in the classrooms, separating them from other students when possible.

Lunch times for elementary students are spread out to lower the number of students eating at once and to accommodate good social distancing while students eat in the cafeteria. For middle/high schools, breakfast and lunch will continue like it has in the past. These schools have much larger spaces for students to grab breakfast, social distance, and eat in various locations. Please contact your school for more information if you have questions. Please remember each school's breakfast and lunch will look a little different due to space. Our primary goal is to have equitable access for free meals to all students and create a safe environment for them to eat in.

Next week, you will see a sign up sheet for our families that are in COA/Distance learning model for week-long food boxes that can be picked up from any one of our schools starting the week of September 13.  There will be more details about this sign up sheet next week.

My goal this year was to launch our new Titan Solutions program that is interactive, allowing students and parents to see what is being offered daily in our cafeterias and to access nutritional information. With the product shortages and each kitchen having different options, we are going to hold off on launching this software until these situations get under control.

Thank you,

Shiloh Ficek

Nutrition Services and Transportation Coordinator