Dear Editor:

AOS 98 school cafeterias have continued to meet tough new federal nutrition standards for school meals, ensuring that meals are healthy and well-balanced and provide students all the nutrition they need to succeed at school.

School meals offer students milk, fruits and vegetables, proteins and grains, and they must meet strict limits on saturated fat and portion size. Starting in school year 2013-2014, school lunches met additional standards requiring:

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

School meals are a great value and a huge convenience for busy families. We meet the USDA requirements for the calories and portion sizes. Boothbay Region Elementary and Edgecomb are Bronze winners for the USDA Healthier School Challenge. We’re always striving to provide students with healthier and tastier choices by purchasing local grown products as much as possible and by adding many different kinds of fruit and vegetables to our menus.

We do homemade rolls and scratch cooking as well as taste-testing on new products and entrees. We’re also looking forward to working with local chefs this coming school year.Our lunch prices for 2014-15 year will be $2.60 for elementary and $2.85 for high school. Breakfast is $1.40 for elementary and $1.50 for high school. Parents and students can pay cash daily, weekly, monthly and you have the option to prepay on line.

We are pleased to announce that we have begun working with a company called Nutrislice that creates online interactive school menus for both our website and free mobile app (for smartphones). These menus contain photos and descriptions of menu items, as well as nutrition and allergen information. Learn more at www.nutrislice.com and look for our menus at http://www.aos98schools.org. We will continue to send menus home for September and October and then discontinue as this information will be in the Boothbay Register, school newsletter and our website.

To find out more about AOS 98 healthy school meals, contact Darlene French, School Nutrition Director at 207-633-7131 or dfrench@csd3-bres.org.

Darlene French
School Nutrition Director