Welcome Back Letter from Food Service
posted August 5, 2021
The Food Service Department would like to welcome everyone back to a new school year! We would like to give you some important information about this school year.
The USDA has announced that all breakfast and lunch meals for this school year will be FREE to ALL students! With that being said now is a great time to get your meal balances caught up and in the positive. You can even deposit payments for next school year or for ala carte purchases!
Even though meals will be free this year it is still important to fill out free/reduced applications for the following reasons:
- If the government decides to offer PEBT funds again this year your qualifications will be based off of free/reduced applications or state direct certification
- The district’s Title funding is based off of the percentage of students that qualify for free/reduced meals
- The district’s grant eligibility is based off of the percentage of students that qualify for free/reduced meals
- The free/reduced percentage is used for many things for our district
Free/Reduced Lunch Application
We have made some changes to our ala carte (extra) purchases this year. Ala carte items are items such as extra milk, water, chips, salads, wraps, etc that can be purchased by students in grades 5th - 12th that do not currently have a block on their account.
From now on ala carte items will only be allowed to be purchased if the family account has a positive balance. If there is a block for these purchases students will only be allowed to purchase items with cash IF their family account is in the positive. Our hope is that with this change accounts will be more manageable for our families. If the account is in the negative your student will be informed that they can not make these purchases. Please be aware that we will NEVER refuse the menued meal to any student regardless of account balance.
If you would like to place an ala carte block on your student’s account please contact Heather Smith at heather.smith@cardinalcomet.com or 641-652-7531 ext. 3257
We hope that this will be the Comet Cafe’s best year yet and look forward to seeing all of our students, staff, and families!