Every day across the United States, approximately 500 million plastic straws make their way into landfills. That's enough used plastic straws to circle the earth 2.5 times or fill 46,400 school buses. Scientists estimate that it can take hundreds of years for a single plastic straw to decompose. With that in mind, many schools and student-led organizations across the country are looking to reduce or eliminate plastic straws on campus and in their communities.

Schools across the country are using classroom management apps to enhance the education of students and help teachers improve their lesson plans. These apps help teachers better manage grades, student attendance, seating charts, parent communication, and more. 

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.

School cafeterias serve millions of meals to students each day. And as the end of the school year approaches, so does the uneasy task of collecting unpaid student meal balances.

 
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.

Earlier this month, school nutrition professionals from across the country gathered together in Austin, TX for our 2019 Connect training event. This is the second year we've held a training conference that combines all of Heartland's family of products and we had a fantastic response from our attendees!

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.