Kenton City Schools Cafeteria Services is excited to announce today that we will be participating in the USDA program allowing K-12 schools to serve free meals to children through December 31st or “as funding allows” per the USDA. This is a complete turnaround from what USDA announced earlier this school year requiring meals to be charged according to the student’s qualifying meal status.
According to the Ohio Department of Education, Ohio Schools may begin participating in this program beginning August 31st, 2020. With this waiver renewal, KCS will be able to credit back meal charges to some student’s accounts who have been charged for lunch meals during this week of our current home delivery program.
Since we will be following the guidelines of the USDA’s Seamless Summer Program, we will also be able to feed ALL children from ages 1 to 18 instead of limiting it only to school age children. This alone will be a big help to families in our community.
We know there are many families still struggling financially as this pandemic continues. Our hope is to be able to reach more families, where the cost of school meals may have been a barrier to participating in the school meal program.
Our goal is to be able to utilize this program no matter how we are feeding our KCS students – whether it be face to face in the school cafeteria or when we are delivering meals or utilizing the parent meal pick up program.
Meals will continue to meet the nutritional requirements for the National School Lunch program and we will continue to make our students’ favorite meals!
We do want to remind parents that we will still need them to complete Free and Reduced applications as many of our school grant applications require that information. Plus we can prevent surprises when the USDA requires we begin charging students for meals again on January 1st, 2021.
Remote learning meal delivery and pick ups will be resuming on our next school day of September 15th. If you have not signed up yet and are interested go to go.kcs.me/lunch2021. The cost of each breakfast and lunch meal will now be FREE!