Jan Page, Director

Cindy Stephens, Bookkeeper

The Lexington City School System is actively enrolled in the Nations School Lunch/Breakfast Program.  Our nutrition department take pride in providing our students with great tasting, nutritious breakfast and lunch meals that meet USDA requirements as Glossary Linkset aside in the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010.  Both Caywood Elementary and Lexington Middle Schools have earned a  Silver HUSSC Award (Healthier US School Challenge).  USDA presents this award to schools that met or exceed the following criteria:   

• Serves school lunches that reflect the Dietary Guidelines for Americans
• Restricting the availability of foods and beverages at school to those that meet healthier guidelines of lower fat, added sugars and sodium  
• Wider variety of fruits and vegetables, including dark green and red/orange vegetables, dry beans and peas and fresh fruits
• Provide whole-grain products
• Low-fat and fat free milk
• Offering nutrition education for students to learn and make healthy choices
• Provide physical education and opportunities for students to be physically active during the school day.

While the LCSS Cafeterias are working hard to successfully meet the necessary requirements set forth by USDA, we are also striving to meet the request of our customers.  This year, along with the assistance of our Coordinated School Health Personnel and our computer lab teachers, we have created a Survey Money where our 5th, 6th, 7th & 8th grade students can give us insight on what meal selections are their favorites.  Their input has not gone unnoticed.  The first week of November our lunch menu was derived from the survey results provided by our 8th grade class. The first week of December was composed from the 7th grade class’ results and the first week of January was set aside for the 6th grade class’ survey results.  Our 5th grade class has just completed their survey and their “Fav 5 Week” will be highlighted the first week in March. 5th grade, get ready your week’s coming!

It is the desire of our nutrition department to provide choices that appeal to our students, to give them the opportunity to broaden their palette and last but not least, teach our children to make choices that will assist them in the development of strong minds and bodies for a more productive lifestyle.  

This year we have kicked it up a notch by offering suspense and excitement in our lunchrooms!  On special occasions such as Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Back to School Day, etc., we give away a prize to a student(s) who choose to participate in our program.  It works like this: for the duration of the event period, each time a student enters his/her lunch number into the cafeteria computers; they are given the opportunity to be a prize winner.  On prize award day, the computer randomly chooses a lunch number.  The student with this assigned number is our lucky winner!!!

These prize winners aren’t the only special customers in our cafeterias.  All of our customers are very important to us!  We try to emphasize this by not only the friendly service we provide, but also by doing little gestures such as recognizing a student on their birthday with a free “Birthday Cookie” compliments of the LCSS Nutrition Department. (Parents please remember to be sure when you register your child that you fill out their data sheets completely so they will be able to take advantage of all the great opportunities our schools have to offer.)

Here at LCSS we recognize the importance of staying connected with your child, and we want to help.  We have just completed our 1st year of offering the Myschoolbucks online payment and monitoring system to our parents.  Rave reviews keep coming in from those of you who have chosen to access this program.  If you haven’t checked it out yet, please do so.  Just log into www.myschoolbucks.com to see what they have to offer.  Additional ways to stay connected are by reviewing the monthly event calendars your children bring home each month or by logging onto our school’s webpage.  Our monthly menus are published on both of these sites for your convenience.

As you have read, we’re very busy in the nutrition department this year.  We’d like to invite you to come see for yourself.  Our cafeterias are open to visitors every Tuesday and Thursday and we would love for you to come and get a “taste” of our program first hand.  See you soon!!