Food/Nutritional Services
Menu
The Food Service Department is proud of the role it plays in providing students with a nutritious meal each school day. Our goal is to provide students with a well-balanced meal, which is appealing to students’ tastes and meets the guidelines of the National School Lunch Program.
The USDA meal patterns require five components must be offered to qualify for a reimbursable meal. A Meat/Protein, Fruit, Vegetable, Bread, and Milk must be offered in specific quantities. These meal patterns are designed to provide 1/3 of the recommended dietary allowances for key nutrients. The menu must also provide no more than 30% of the total calories from fat and no more than 10% from saturated fat over the course of a week.
In order to encourage students to eat a complete lunch, we offer two entrée choices at each elementary, and more choices at the Middle and High School. Every entrée we offer is available as a meal when bundled with our fruit and vegetable bar and a milk. We believe it is important to encourage students to eat a balanced meal, so all entrees are available as meals to all students.
At each school we offer a self serve fruit and vegetable bar. By providing four vegetables, a fresh fruit and a canned fruit, the students can pick their favorite items, instead of passing up one choice offered on a menu because they don’t care for it. We will introduce the students to a greater variety of fresh fruit including Passion Fruit, Blood Orange, and Papaya, just to name a few. We use whole grain white bread and whole wheat rolls and will offer whole wheat pizza crusts to ensure students get the grains they need.
French Fries (which are considered a vegetable) are baked rather than deep fried in all schools. Fries are only offered on the menu a few times per month.
Desserts are considered a treat with lunch and have been limited to once per week on the menu.
USDA Donated Foods
Part of the funding of the National School Lunch Program comes to the district in the form of USDA donated foods. As students tastes have changed, the types of foods offered as donated foods have changed with them. Rather than receive whole Turkeys as in the past, we now receive processed items such as Turkey Mini Corn Dogs, Chicken Nuggets, Fully Cooked Hamburger Patties, Pizza Dippers and Taco Meat. These items are prepared using ingredients that help lower the fat and salt they contain. For example, cheese products are made with part skim milk, and beef products have added soy or turkey. We also receive much of our canned fruit and frozen vegetables from USDA.
Cooking
In order to meet the nutritional requirements of our meals, we take specific steps when preparing food items. Ground Beef is rinsed after cooking to skim off fat, and ground turkey is added when possible. All products that are typically deep fried, (chicken nuggets, chicken patties, popcorn chicken) are baked in ovens with no oil added. We do not add butter or margarine when cooking vegetables and they are steamed when possible. Salt is no longer added as a seasoning, and we use pepper or other herbs as flavor enhancements.
A la Carte
A la Carte items are snacks that students may purchase that are not part of a meal. They are offered to Middle and High School students only and are intended to complement a meal rather than replace it. For that reason, we follow the USDA price guidelines so that a meal is always a better value than purchasing items separately. All A la Carte items we sell are approved by USDA guidelines, although we have limited high fat A la Carte items, and introduced more baked and low-fat snack items in their place during the past several years.