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Mostly Cloudy Buying lunch goes high-tech
Oceanside installs new meal payment system
As the 2011-12 academic year wound down, the Oceanside School District implemented a new lunch-sale system that streamlined the process of buying meals and provided parents with more options for payment and control.
From the beginning of April to the middle of May, the district installed the Point of Sale system from Nutrikids, a school food service management company based in Rochester. According to the district’s assistant superintendent for business, Louis Frontario, Nutrikids is a much more up-to-date system than what the schools had previously.
“The system that we had before was cumbersome and outdated, and I couldn’t get the machines to talk automatically to one place, in this case [Food Service Director] Jane Blackburn’s office,” Frontario said. “We still had to do some manual processes to collect data.”
Frontario said that the “soft roll-out” of the system over a six-week period allowed the staff to get used to Nutrikids’ functions and capabilities. The system allows parents to access it from home, via the website myschoolbucks.com, and create their own accounts. They can put as much as $120 into a family account that can be used with a credit or debit card, or PayPal, by their children.
“The actual prepayment is great, so they can just send their child to school without having to think whether they gave the right change each day,” Frontario said. “It’s still only an option, though. Parents can still decide to use cash or check if they prefer.”
High school and middle school students with money in their accounts can use their ID cards to purchase food, or ask a staff member to input their name into the system.
Nutrikids also allows parents who set up accounts to review what their children have purchased over the past month, “so if parents are curious to see what their children are buying, they can log in,” Frontario said. “It maintains the information for the past 30 days.”
According to a pamphlet Frontario provided at the Aug. 21 Board of Education meeting, the system also ensures discreet handling of free and reduced-priced meals, access to allergy and parental spending limit information and accurate claims of reimbursable meals to the New York State Education Department.
