More students are buying lunches at Bozeman schools since the district abandoned the National School Lunch Program after deeming the nutritional rules too strict. Revenues in the fall semester increased nearly $50,000 compared to the previous year.
Last year the school board voted to let the high school drop out of the federal program, saying the nutritional guidelines were costing the cafeteria customers.
Bozeman Public Schools Food Services Director Bob Burrows says the high schoolers weren't purchasing school lunches because they knew they wouldn’t get enough food.
“The perception last year was that if you eat a school lunch, you’re not going to get enough to eat. So by diverging from those rules a little bit, it helped the high school.”
According to Burrows, the USDA set a one-size-fit- all approach for how many calories a high schooler needs, taking the calorie intake of an inactive high school aged female and the intake of an active high-school aged male then bell-curving it to the center.
“So right off the bat when you have a bell curve like that and the calories are right in the middle, the people on the right side of bell curve aren’t getting enough to eat and the people on the left side are getting too much to eat. No one is happy.”
This year snacks that are high in sugar, salt and calories make up about 70 percent of snack sales at Bozeman High.
By abandoning the federal program, Bozeman High lost a $117,000 annual federal subsidy.