Creating a school garden is a fun and engaging way to give students a hands-on learning experience. School gardens help students learn about eating healthy, growing their own food, and can have a more meaningful impact when it comes to the nutritional decisions they make. While traditional school gardens remain very popular, some districts are taking this idea to the next level with aquaponic gardens.

Every year we offer free MySchoolBucks materials so districts can share the benefits of online payments with parents. To make sure we're providing the best marketing resources to districts, we surveyed over 90,000 parents to learn more about how they receive school communications and used this information to grow our offerings!  
 

With all new designs, the school menu templates are back! These new 2019-20 school menu templates will be sure to liven up lunchtime and help you prepare for the new year.

 
Lunchtime is often considered crunch time for school food service staff - for more reasons than one! Serving meals quickly and efficiently, while also making sure students have time to eat, can be a challenge for many schools. That's why any feature or method that can help speed up your serving lines, even by a few seconds, can be monumental.

One school district in Northern California found that simply using audio messages at their Point of Sale stations helped to increase their line speed and satisfaction among the students.

On Friday, May 3, food service professionals will be celebrating the 7th Annual School Lunch Hero Day. This day provides the perfect opportunity to recognize those individuals who work so diligently throughout the year to serve nutritious and delicious meals to our students. The impressions they make on each child that comes through the cafeteria is remarkable.

This week schools and programs nationwide are celebrating all that afterschool professionals do each day! It's a time to recognize those who work with students during out-of-school hours, including community partners, afterschool program staff, and youth and child care workers. 

Are you curious about using digital signage in your cafeterias? You’re not alone - the digital signage industry in the U.S. is anticipated to reach $6.90 billion by 2025. That’s quite a jump considering the current digital signage market is only half that amount today. So why the big shift?

Well, let's think about the students you serve each day. This new generation of students, sometimes referred to as iGen or Gen Z, are digital natives that have never known a time without access to a smartphone or tablet. They grew up with technology at their fingertips and the ability to consume information from a screen. The iGen generation has grown accustomed to highly-visual, personalized communication; so it only makes sense that your cafeterias and schools should follow suit.

There are a number of benefits supporting the addition digital signage to your cafeteria.  But before you purchase, here are 3 things your nutrition program should consider:

Schools and parent communication have reached a crossroad in recent years thanks to the ubiquity of smartphones and mobile apps. Currently, 77% of all U.S. adults own a smartphone and nearly 55% of them receive news alerts on their phones. As this trend toward mobile communication continues, technology companies are fast developing mobile apps that cater to the needs of school communities. Now teachers, parents, and students can communicate and collaborate more easily without having to rely on more traditional forms of communication like phone calls and letters.

Implementing a new point of sale system in your cafeterias may seem like a daunting task, but it doesn’t have to be. With the right plan in place, you can keep your implementation on track to ensure a smooth rollout.

From our Heartland family to yours,
have a wonderful holiday season!