Every year the Advanced Placement Program (AP) grants millions of eligible high school students the opportunity to participate in advanced courses and earn college credit. AP Coordinators who manage and teach AP Courses have several tasks throughout the year to ensure students are prepared to take the AP Exams in May. Part of this process includes collecting student fees and ordering AP Exams through the College Board.

The School Nutrition Association's 73rd Annual National Conference is quickly approaching! Between July 14-16, over 800 exhibitors (including us!) and 3,500 decision-makers will gather in St. Louis for our industry's largest conference of the year. Discuss trends, exchange ideas, and collaborate with your peers and colleagues. We're sure there will be plenty to keep you busy at this years event!

For the past two years, MySchoolBucks and Heartland School Solutions has provided Growth Grants to school nutrition programs across the country. To date, we have awarded over $100,000 to districts who use MySchoolBucks and helped over 130 food service departments promote their nutrition programs in fun and creative ways, using funds they might not otherwise have access to. In addition to offering our food service Growth Grant program for the 2019-20 school year, we are excited to offer for the first time Growth Grants for before & aftercare programs! 

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.