LAUSD’s Food Service Division continues to provide healthy and nutritious meals to students. Under USDA’s Seamless Summer Option, all students receive meals at no charge, and this trend will continue in the 2022-23 school year, under California’s Universal Free Meals mandate. “We are steadfast in our commitment to supporting the nutritional needs of students,” says an LAUSD spokesperson. Besides providing three daily meals to students, the program serves weekend meal and also distributed food boxes to students and families at 63 Grab & Go Food Centers across the district for the holiday season. LAUSD started this year with acute labor shortages and disruptions in the supply chain for both food and paper products, with supply chain issues pushing prices significantly higher and creating product shortages. “Our buyers, nutritionists, and food services staff have worked diligently with vendor partners to ensure that we continue to provide nutritious meals to students,” the spokesperson notes.

CPS had been tussling with in-person reopening at the start of the second half of the 2021-22 school year, with Mayor Lori Lightfoot and the Chicago Teachers Union taking opposing sides, resulting in a number of cancelled classes in early January. CPS participates in the National School Lunch and Breakfast programs as well as the Child & Adult Care Food Program (CACFP), the Summer Food Service Program and the Fresh Fruit & Vegetable Program (FFVP) and offers free breakfast, lunch, after-school suppers and snacks and Saturday breakfast and lunch during the school year as well as breakfast and lunch during summer school and fresh fruits and vegetables to elementary school students during the school year. It began participating in the Community Eligibility Program (CEP) a decade ago and all its school sites are now part of CEP. For its 2022 fiscal year, CPS is anticipating $214 million in federal reimbursements, including $202 million for school lunches/breakfasts/snacks/donated foods, $9.9 million for CACFP and $1.8 million for FFVP.

All students were physically back at schools this fall and at the start of the spring semester, with meals served at each school site.

CCSD will provide free school meals throughout the 2021-22 school year under USDA’s extended Seamless Summer Option program.

Broward County Public Schools Food and Nutrition Services continues to serve nutritious meals that students love even with a multitude of challenges due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Breakfast and lunch are available each school day without charge in school cafeterias, and Food and Nutrition Services also serves supper in many school after-care programs. While the menu items are familiar and comforting, the department implemented physical distancing and enhanced sanitizing protocols to keep everyone safe.

Houston ISD is 100% CEP and served meals under SFSP during the school year.

This year HCPS is operating under the Seamless Summer Option, which provides free meals for all enrolled students. When school started this year, there was no e-learning out of the school sites, so all students returned to school. Seamless Summer Option does not allow for any community meal distribution, so the focus has been feeding all the students in school. Even though the department had to with unprecedented supply chain and staff shortages, it has still almost reached its pre-pandemic participation levels, a testament to the work of its very committed SNS staff.

OCPS continues to grow and build, adding two high schools and a middle school this school year with two elementary schools and another middle school slated to open before the end of 2022.

With almost all students back in school buildings, but with the pandemic still very much looming, Gwinnett’s School Nutrition Program decided to start the school year with an abbreviated version of its menus to include student favorites that its teams could easily execute. These options included items such as pizza, handheld sandwiches, grab and go baskets and a few individually wrapped hot items. “Our philosophy was less is more, have our teams spend time preparing kid favorites that also happen to be easier for a small team, considering our staffing challenges,” observes Ken Yant, executive director of school nutrition for the district. Additionally, Gwinnett also had three Digital Learning Days in the first semester during which meals (a bag contained both a breakfast & a lunch) were delivered via bus distribution on some 500 bus routes, and through curbside pickup. The nutrition program also worked closely with its distributor and industry partners to manage supply chain shortages and pivoted whenever necessary. “Although we may not have always had the exact items that we wanted, we always had the items that we needed in order to offer our students well balanced and nutritious meals,” Yant observes.

All students were back in brick-and-mortar instruction this year beginning on the first day of school on August 10, 2021. In order to provide a variety of choices, School Food Service expanded its menu offerings and is operating under USDA waivers that allow feeding all students free meals as providing afterschool snacks and suppers at all locations. Due to the waivers, meal participation has increased, and many schools also offer grab and go take home snacks. Between Aug. 10 and Dec. 6, 2021, the program served 13.5 million meals.

In addition, the waivers have let School Food Service support students while on Thanksgiving and Winter breaks by providing grab on go kits with nine meals and nine snacks that parents picked up prior to the Thanksgiving break for a total of 71,658 meals impacting 3,981 students; it did the same for the winter break, except with 13 days of meals and snacks.

Fairfax County’s FNS program has taken the approach of providing meal service to the student population via full-service cafeteria operations.

MCPS announced the closures of 11 school sites for 14 days, through Jan. 18, at the start of the spring term because of excessive COVID infection rates.

Under the nationwide waiver from the USDA, the approach for meal production and distribution for the 2021-22 school year is to offer free meals to all students at the 257 school site locations where it operates meal service.

WCPS transitioned back to its pre-pandemic kitchen operations and cafe self-service lines for meal production/distribution last fall but, due to supply chain matters and staffing shortages, it significantly scaled back its reimbursable meal options and a la carte offerings. The district again offered a virtual academy option this year, so Child Nutrition Services continued to provide curbside pickup services at a few locations for remote learners.

Upon returning to school in the fall of 2021, students returned to cafeteria line service with a simplified menu and bar-coded ID cards to check out.  Principals then directed students to eat in different areas of the school to continue social distancing.

In early January, Dallas ISD announced an extension of its district-wide mask mandate through spring break after planning to end it in mid-January, but it plans continue to conduct in-person classes even as it struggles with staffing issues.

PGCPS moved to all virtual learning for the first two weeks of the spring term (Jan. 3-14). Meanwhile, the meal program faces staffing challenges even as district employees began a collective bargain push with the collection of signatures following the winter break

As the district continues to deal with the Omicron surge by closing or keeping open individual schools for in-person learning based on their particular circumstances, the Division of Food Services is making grab and go meals available for any student who is in virtual learning, either due to schools shifting to virtual due to Covid-19 or because they are quarantining at home. For these, one meal box containing five breakfast and five lunch meals per week per enrolled student is offered for pickup at designated locations between 9:00-10:00 a.m. and 1:00-2:00 p.m. every day. Once a school has been determined it will go virtual, the meal boxes will become available to that student population the next school day.

The bulk of CFISD students returned to school this fall but the meal program maintained a small curbside operation to service the students that were still attending virtually. The biggest challenges it faced in the fall were a lack of staffing and supply-chain related shortages but the department increased its starting rates for new food service workers, which helped staffing levels but it is still below the levels that it needs. In an effort to combat staff shortages, it continues to limit menu choices, although it is offering more choices than last year. The Nutrition Services Dept. has partnered with the district culinary arts programs to employ students and it also shares employees with the transportation and day care operations.

“Supply chain shortages have been brutal,” Crawford says. “Thankfully, we have some purchasing power and warehouse capabilities. This has enabled us to consistently offer menu items that meet federal meal plan guidelines. Overall, the theme of this year has been flexibility!”

With procurement of key breakfast meal components such as juice and fruit adversely affected by national food supply chain issues, BCPS began a modified breakfast approach last October through which students continue to pick up a breakfast bag containing an entrée and juice—with the option to pick up another fruit and milk—upon arrival in order to limit the waste generated by uneaten meal components. Students on a virtual learning program

can order weekly meal boxes that include five breakfasts and five lunches.

Breakfast meals are eaten in classrooms while for lunch meal service, students go through the cafeteria line and choose an entrée, fruit and vegetable sides, and milk. Snack, a la carte and adult meal purchases currently are not available.

The newly renamed Memphis-Shelby County (Tenn.) Schools recently joined the Urban School Food Alliance, a coalition of some of the largest public school districts in the country, including the four largest—New York City, Los Angeles USD, Chicago and Miami-Dade.

Cobb County opened the 2021-22 school year as usual on August 2^nd, with students offered the choice to enroll in an on-line program or attend school on-site five days a week, with the latter option being chosen by over 98% of students.  The Food/Nutrition Services (FNS) department now offer breakfast at all schools and has continued offering grab and go breakfast from mobile carts and in the school cafes. Lunches are served in the school cafe using traditional serving lines and a process closely resembling meal service prior to March 2020. FNS continued COVD precautions in the serving areas, including hand sanitizer, plexiglass barriers and frequent cleaning while menus have been streamlined to reduce the number of options available to students each day primarily due to staffing shortages and supply chain disruptions. Still, meal counts are up 46% at breakfast and 10% at lunch as compared to March 2020. For the families who chose the on-line program, FNS offers the option to order weekly meal kits for pick-up at one of seven schools strategically located across the county.

Since visitors to buildings have been restricted, FNS began offering classroom celebration snacks in the 2020-21 school year through which parents can order treats for their child’s class to celebrate their birthday. In select schools, parents are emailed the month before their child’s birthday to let them know about the options.  Parents pre-order and pay via the Café Manager program and then on the day of the classroom celebration, the café manager provides the treats to the class either during meal service or directly in the classroom based on a pre-arranged schedule with the teacher. “This has become a very popular option with our parents,” notes FNS Executive Director Emily Hanlin.

The Duval County Public Schools Nutrition Program exposes students to various healthy options using flavorful ingredients. Menus are developed with wholesome, minimally processed ingredients using single-source, clean-label products and serving locally grown produce with nutrition standards based on the USDA school meal pattern regulations, offering items low in sodium and fat and rich in whole grains, fresh fruits, and vegetables focusing on serving local produce.

For the 2021-2022 school year, the district is operating under the Seamless Summer Option, so meals are free for all students. Reduced COVID-19 restrictions have allowed the district’s Nutrition Program to offer even more variety with menus that transition seasonally and introduce a new menu concept in high schools—the Food Truck Takeover—with weekly dishes inspired by food truck favorites.

The nutrition program continues to work closely with local farmers to buy and serve local fruits and vegetables to students, with over of the produce used being grown within Florida. Not only does this partnership continue the farm-to-table trend, but it gives the program an opportunity to introduce students to a wide variety of fresh new foods and flavors while also benefitting the farmers and the entire community.

The local produce program has also seen an integral driver in providing nutrition education in a fun and engaging way through programs such as Discovery Kitchen Cook-Off, which allows students to feel like the top chef on their own cooking show, and the Student Choice Food Shows that give students a voice in deciding menu options.

For the 2021-22 school year, Northside Child Nutrition Services is offering several options for meals whether students are doing in-person or virtual learning. They include free breakfast and lunch to all district students through the current USDA Waiver in place at all campuses. There is also a free supper program at approved campuses with enrichment programs. Overall, Northside has seen increased daily meal participation and is currently serving approximately some 90,000 total meals a day and 16 million annually.