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The 2021 K-12 Power Players cope with coronavirus-related challenges
Food Management highlights how the 25 largest school districts in the country coped with COVID last fall and how they plan to approach the spring.
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The coronavirus pandemic has deeply affected the school meal programs of Food Management’s K-12 Power Players, which is composed of the 25 largest public K-12 school districts in the United States as ranked by enrollment. Some have remained completely closed to in-school instruction while others have embraced a hybrid model in which some students take in-person classes while others learn from offsite—typically their homes—a situation that forces the district meal program to simultaneously deploy two different approaches to feeding kids.
Each of these programs is also challenged with keeping meal count numbers—and therefore revenues—up sufficiently to continue to remain fiscally viable, not easy when so many potential customers are not in district buildings, as they would be in a typical school year. The meal programs have had varying rates of success in meeting this challenge, with some managing to approach normal meal count numbers though a range of strategies that include not only getting the usual breakfast and lunch meals to kids through a variety of means, including delivery to individual homes, but also by adding suppers, snacks, weekend meals and even family meals to their offerings.
Here are the 25 largest school meal programs in the United States.
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