School Lunch and RocketScan Go Together Like Macaroni and Cheese
Tuesday, July 2, 2019
Q.What’s tasty, nutritious and eaten regularly by more than 30 million children across the United States?
A: Chicken nuggets. Also pepperoni pizza, tacos, spaghetti and a variety of other meals served daily in lunchrooms across the country as part of the National School Lunch Program. The program, signed into law by President Harry Truman in 1946, turns 73 this year.
That’s a lot of chicken nuggets.
More importantly, the program, administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, individual state agencies and an army of dedicated school nutrition specialists, provides free and reduced-price meals to children in low-income families. The program also includes snacks for after-school programs, a breakfast program and a summer component to ensure that needy kids have access to nutritious meals even when school is out.
But it all starts with a determination of eligibility, which means schools have to ensure that families fill out applications at the beginning of each school year. That can be a monumental task, both for school officials and for busy parents dealing with a backpack full of crumpled paper and all of the other information requests that a new school year brings.
Save Time and Money with RocketScan Meal Application Processing Software
At Image One, we provide a wide range of solutions to all kinds of businesses struggling with clunky processes for managing information, especially the kind that is still trapped on paper.
But we’re especially proud of the work we do to help streamline the process of registering families for the National School Lunch Program. Our RocketScan meal application processing software turns 15 this year. Used in approximately 250 school districts across the country, RocketScan has saved school employees thousands of hours of labor by automating the meal application process with a combination of scanning and online options that improve both the accuracy and the participation rates of the program.
In district after district, we hear from our customers about the dramatic transformation of a program that had previously depended on painstaking data entry, one application at a time, into a system of automation in which most parents simply update their forms online and the remainder can still submit paper forms that are scanned in batches, “read” by OCR technology and uploaded to a central database. It’s more than a time saver.
It’s streamlining of a program that operates on a 10-day deadline and has to be completed amid the crush of other new school year deadlines and requirements.
It’s a solution that we provide in multiple languages and with many customized features in keeping with the fact that just like the children who eat all those lunches, no two school districts are alike.
School Nutrition Professionals Dedicated to a Mission Bigger than Lunch
In fact, the school nutrition specialists who oversee student nutrition across the country manage to produce a widely diverse range of options and creative meal planning. From student-grown gardening initiatives to programs designed to teach students about healthy eating choices, school nutrition professionals are incredibly dedicated to a mission much bigger than lunch.
At their 73rd annual national conference in St. Louis July 14-16, School Nutrition Association members will gather for more than 120 educational sessions on everything from menu development and culinary skills to minimizing waste.
We will be there too, answering questions about RocketScan and sharing our success stories from a diverse collection of school districts from central Florida to the California coastline, to Anchorage Alaska, where one program specialist recently wrote to us to say thank you for the difference RocketScan and support from Image One has made there.
“RocketScan’s support is so crucial to my job because I work to meet the daily needs of our students,” wrote Anchorage School District program specialist Jennifer Turner Meiwes. “We are in the business of educating all students for success in life and we cannot do that if our students are not adequately fed. The health and welfare of our students is intrinsic to our mission.”
Join Us at SNA 2019 and Take 15% Off Meal Application Processing Software
At Image One, we’re proud of what RocketScan can do, and the level of support we provide to places like the Anchorage School District, but we’re also pretty proud of our clients. The National School Lunch Program works because of them.
Stop by booth #765 at the School Nutrition Association National Conference to learn more about how RocketScan can take the work out of your meal application process. To celebrate RocketScan’s 15th birthday, we’ll take 15% off the price.
You can also call us or click on the link below for more information.
Contact us to learn more about RocketScan meal application software
