St. Francis Area Schools cafeterias are meeting the challenging of federal nutrition standards for school meals, ensuring that meals are healthy and well-balanced and provide students all the nutrition they need to succeed at school. Now is a great time to encourage your kids to choose school lunch!

School meals offer students milk, fruits and vegetables, proteins and grains, and they must meet strict limits on saturated fat, trans fat and portion size. The new regulations require school lunches to meet additional standards requiring:

• Age-appropriate calorie limits.

• Larger servings of vegetables and fruits (students must take at least one serving of produce).

• A wider variety of vegetables, including dark green and red/orange vegetables and legumes.

• Fat-free or 1% milk (flavored milk must be fat-free).

• More whole grains.

• And less sodium.

Some of the more apparent changes made include, a limit on the number of bread/grain items now served, stricter control on meat/meat alternate (protein) serving sizes, unlimited fruits and/or vegetable servings. But with your support, we can be sure that children adopt the kind of healthful eating habits and lifestyles that will enable them to live longer, more productive lives.

Visit the USDA website to find out more about healthy school meals requirements.