Gates Chili Central School District

Dear Gates Chili Families,

It’s hard to believe we are nearing the end of our school year. Most months this school year, we served more than 60,000 meals per month out of our GC kitchens! We are so pleased that so many students have been taking advantage of the free nutritious lunch and breakfast offered for all students this year.

We have a few important changes to share, pertaining to free meals and school nutrition in the coming months.

Menu changes

Beginning April 2022, the district is moving to a new menu hosting site. The district is moving from Nutrislice to a new site called MealViewer, which will allow families to view menus and nutritional information and provides an improved interface for the user. Families will still be able to access the breakfast and lunch menus for their student’s school by going to Gates Chili - Menu or through the district’s mobile app. This change will take effect on April 1. It is important to note that any families that may be accessing our current menus through the Nutrislice app will no longer be able to use that application.

Free meals for summer

We are excited to be able to host our annual Summer Meals program again, which provides meals for all children ages 18 and younger. Part of this program will include meals at Gates Recreation and Chili Recreation Summer Camps. We hope to share more information about locations for our summer program in the coming weeks.

Free and reduced applications

As it stands now, the free meal program funded by the federal government may not continue into the 2022-23 school year. While this may change in the coming months, we are kindly asking families to complete a free and reduced meal application. A current application will allow students to be temporarily eligible for the first 30 operational days of the next school year (2022-23). This will give families time to put in a new application for next year once the reapplication process begins over the summer.

In addition, these applications are linked to other items, including:

• Students who request fee waivers for AP and IB exams, college applications, etc. will not qualify for the fee waiver if they do not have a current application on file.
• If the federal government decides to release a new batch of P-EBT Food Benefit Cards to families during the pandemic, families may not qualify if there is not a current application on file.

Meal purchasing changes

Finally, we want to let you know about an important change to school nutrition operations for next school year. As we continue to work to meet the needs of our families, the district will be switching to a new online payment collection system. Effective July 2022, Gates Chili will utilize MySchoolBucks for school meals and other payments. Families will be able to add funds for school meals to their student’s accounts just as they did with MyPaymentsPlus. Any funds leftover in a student’s MyPaymentsPlus account will be transferred to MySchoolBucks on June 30, 2022. We will be sharing additional details about this change in the coming months.

Thank you for your ongoing support.

Kindly,

Janice Phillips
Director of School Nutrition