Healthy school meals are a critical part of the school environment – like teachers, classrooms, books, and computers – and set kids up for success. These resources will help you plan nutritious breakfasts that can help improve a child’s health, growth, development, and educational outcomes.
Menu Planning Flexibilities - 2024 Final Rule
- Meats/Meat Alternates at Breakfast: Establishes a combined grains and meats/meat alternates meal component in the School Breakfast Program (SBP) and removes the requirement for schools to offer 1.0 ounce equivalent of grains each day at breakfast. Schools may offer grains, meats/meat alternates, or a combination of both, to meet the minimum ounce equivalent requirements in this combined meal component.
- Substituting Vegetables for Grains in Tribal Communities at Breakfast: Allows school food authorities and schools that are tribally operated, operated by the Bureau of Indian Education, and that serve primarily American Indian or Alaska Native children to serve vegetables to meet the grains requirement in the SBP.
- Substituting Vegetables for Grains in Guam and Hawaii at Breakfast: Allows all schools in Guam and Hawaii to serve vegetables to meet the grains requirement in the SBP.
- Substituting Vegetables for Fruits at Breakfast: Continues to allow schools to substitute vegetables for fruits in the SBP and simplifies the vegetable variety requirement:
- Schools choosing to offer vegetables at breakfast one day per school week have the option to offer any vegetable, including a starchy vegetable.
- Schools choosing to substitute vegetables for fruits at breakfast on two or more days per school week are required to offer vegetables from at least two different vegetable subgroups.
Note: For school year 2024-25, congress has provided schools the option to offer any vegetables in place of fruits at breakfast (no subgroup requirements).
- Nuts and Seeds at Breakfast: Allows nuts and seeds to credit for the full meats/meat alternates component, removing the 50 percent crediting limit for nuts and seeds at breakfast.
Meal Service Options
- Grab & Go - serves children a breakfast “to go,” often in a paper or plastic bag, before school or during a morning break.
- Breakfast in the Classroom - involves serving the breakfast meal to children during a morning class, often while the teacher is taking attendance or giving classroom announcements.
- Second Chance Breakfast - most common in middle and high schools and builds in another opportunity between classes for students to pick up breakfast from a food cart or in the cafeteria and eat it on the way to or in their next class.
- Offer versus Serve - a provision that allows students to decline some of the food offered. The goals of OVS are to reduce food waste in the school meals programs while permitting students to decline foods they do not intend to eat.
Resources
- Reducing Added Sugars at School Breakfast (training guide)
- Offer versus Serve Materials (posters and tip sheets)
- Maintaining Integrity in Meals Served Outside the Cafeteria (tip sheet)
- Offering Smoothies (training guide)
- Offering Meats/Meat Alternates at Breakfast (training guide)
- Recipes
