1. Learn about the National School Lunch Program. President Harry S Truman started this program which reimburses schools that offer healthy lunches to their students. If your school qualifies, meals may eventually be free or at a minimal cost to your school.

1. Learn about the National School Lunch Program. President Harry S Truman started this program which reimburses schools that offer healthy lunches to their students. If your school qualifies, meals may eventually be free or at a minimal cost to your school.

2. Recruit reliable food suppliers from you community. Talk to caterers and restaurants in your area. You may be surprised to find that many already service schools and community groups during the lunch hour. Don't be afraid to suggest pricing discounts or donations back to your school too.

3. Establish frequent ordering sessions. Both parents and students are going to want to change their orders somewhat often. If you lock them into menu sessions that last several months, it will create more work for you when they want to change an order. Monthly ordering sessions are the most efficient. They make it easy for parents to remember to place their orders. And it also creates a tendency to wait until the next session to change the order as opposed to doing it in the middle of the current session. The result is less work for you.

4. Place the school lunch menu online. Save yourself thousands of hours of paperwork by using the internet to accept lunch orders. Your web host should be able to offer calendar formatted ordering lunch menus. Parents will fill out the forms on your website and they will also be able to pay for the orders by credit card. While it may sound complicated, it is actually very simple. Your web host will handle all of the details in exchange for a small fee for each transaction

5. Review reports. The beauty of having your school lunch menu online is that the website will collect and report on all of the orders for you. There will be no need to collect paper forms, read hand writing or tally checks. You will just need to click a button or two and everything you need to know about the orders will be readily available.

6. Lend an ear to your parents. Feedback from your parents is crucial. Think about conducting annual surveys to understand what they are thinking and then become proactive with the results. Now that your lunch menu is online, you should conduct surveys the same way. Your webhost will likely be able to link online surveys to your lunch program. You simply provide the questions you want answers to.

7. Listen to your servers. The most valuable feedback about your lunch program will be presented to you by the parents who are actually serving the students. Combine the experiences they share with the data received from the surveys offered to your families and you will have a multitude of ideas on how to improve your lunch menu program. Your school community will clearly see that the extra efforts made that are truly in the best interests of the children.