School Lunch Software

All across the country, kids are going back to school. They’re going back to books, homework, and Michelle Obama’s school lunch guidelines.

Just how contentious are these guidelines? A writer from the St. Cloud Times went to a Sartell High School in Minnesota to find out, pointing out that there are even restrictions on the number of condiments students may use.

How are kids responding to these school lunch rules in general? For starters, they’re bringing their own lunches from home more. They’re also not eating the vegetables and fruits that are a required component of the school lunches, and that’s increasing the amount of waste.

The decreased revenue due to more kids bringing their lunches from home is hitting the already cash-strapped budgets of local school districts in the pocketbook.

Students, especially athletes, have complained about being undernourished due to the smaller portions. Below is a general complaint from this March:

This, along with the loss in revenue, has caused some schools to opt out of the National School Lunch Program. One school that did just that was Wayzata High School, which is Minnesota’s largest high school. How’s it working out for them? From CBS Minnesota:

Kids pay 25 cents more per meal, and the district loses both federal funding and the opportunity to buy lower priced USDA commodities, but so far, the results are encouraging.

 

“We’re seeing increases between two and three hundred lunches a day,” Anderson [the supervisor of the Culinary Express Department] said.

Imagine that: the school officials who see their students day-in-and-day-out know what’s better for the students than Washington bureaucrats. Hopefully, the trend of local officials taking more charge and making more decisions for their students will continue and not just regarding school lunches.