Westerville Schools Continue to Meet USDA Nutrition Standards & Meal Price Guidelines

Westerville City Schools will continue to serve school meals that meet the federal nutrition standards, ensuring that meals are healthy, well balanced, and provide students the nutrition they need to succeed at school.

School meals offer students a variety of milk, fruits, vegetables, proteins, and grains; and must meet strict limits on saturated fat and portion size, while also meeting the following standards. 

• Age appropriate calorie limits;
• Larger servings of vegetables and fruits (students must take at least one serving of a fruit or a vegetable);
• A wider variety of vegetables, including dark green and red/orange vegetables, and legumes;
• Fat-free or 1% milk (flavored milk must be fat-free);
• More whole grains; and
• Less sodium.

“We continue to work on offering Westerville students healthier and tastier choices,” said Kari Dennis, Manager of Food Services & Purchasing.  “In addition to meeting the USDA nutrition standards, we continue to offer locally grown foods, healthy new menu options, student tastings, and nutrition education.  We also have fresh produce bars in all of our school buildings, increasing the daily variety of fresh fruits and vegetables available to our students.” School meals are a great value and a huge convenience for busy families too!  

School Program regulations at 7 CFR 210.14(e) require school food authorities (SFAs) participating in the National School Lunch Program to ensure sufficient funds are provided to the nonprofit school food service account for meals served to students not eligible for free or reduced price meals.  There are two ways to meet this requirement: either through the prices charged for “paid” meals or through other non-Federal sources provided to the nonprofit school food service account.  Based on the USDA formula, the average price of lunch charged across the district must be at or above $2.95 in order to be in compliance with the law.  Westerville City schools received an exemption from increasing our pricing for the 2016-2017 school year, although our calculations at that time showed an increase should be implemented.  

After completing calculations for the 2017-2018 school year it has been determined Westerville City Schools is currently not charging enough and will be asking the Board of Education to take action at the August 7, 2017 Board meeting, to increase lunch prices.  Our average price, based on October 2016 lunch counts, was only $2.72. To minimize the impact to the Westerville families in the future, we need to increase the meal pricing by $0.15 at each grade level for the 2017-2018 school year.