[quote name='ferant316']That's a little bit better than what my parents have to do since they started it every August my dad complains because its $600 in one lump sum in August. Says its easier to pay the $3.75 a day then $600 at once. Funny too because I'm only 10 years older than my sister and when I was in the same High School lunches were $1.90. Almost doubled in price in 7 years.[/QUOTE]
Really off topic but:
For $3.75 a day it better be a gourmet meal! You don't have the option to brown bag it, because for that cost I think you could save a ton if you brown bagged it. High school lunch from 1995-1999 was 1.35 for the whole lunch. Our food was GOOD homemade food (the pizza was amazing, and home-made by the cafeteria ladies), until senior year when they started giving us the frozen processed foods, which almost no one bought, and if they did buy it, they weren't eating it. There was still the option to bring your own lunch in a bag. I don't know what happened after that. But I learned to like a lot of different foods from high school lunches. I still make tuna macaroni salad just the way our high school did (though I don't serve it with an ice cream scoop like they did)!
Another oddity was we were REQUIRED to take a milk if we bought school lunch, no other options were offered, not even water, it had to be milk and it had to be on our tray. They did have every kind of milk, including chocolate though. A lot of milk got wasted because of this. We had choices for the other options, we didn't have to take vegetables, so at least there weren't a lot of those wasted, but they were available if you wanted them and didn't cost extra, and you could get just a sandwich, or the hot sandwich of the day which was $1.
The cost and options boggle my mind. I went to 2 different grade schools, both did not have cafeteria's equipped with cooking equipment, and did not serve hot lunches. We were required to brown bag it. The food brought was not monitored in any way, you could bring anything. The only hot food we ever saw was if we were good we got a pizza party once or twice a year. There was no fridge to keep our food in so we had to bring something that would hold all day. They had a fridge to keep the milk in, if you wanted milk you paid something like $3 a month and you got a milk every day for the whole month. At least the milk didn't come in glass bottles like it did when my uncle was in school, it was in a paper container. My first grade school didn't offer milk, you had to bring a drink in a thermos, the milk thing didn't even happen till I got to my second grade school. I ate peanut butter and jelly every single day up until high school, and I still eat it today though I make it with low sugar jelly, real peanut butter and non-processed bread of some sort. I didn't even know there was the option to buy your lunch at any school until we got to high school. Apparently now everyone gets their lunches hot from the cafeteria right from kindergarten and I have heard that some schools even require the children to eat the cafeteria food and they aren't allowed to brown bag it. I am not sure if my situation is unique but this is the way it was for me.
