Children may also receive meals at a reduced rate or free. If your household now receives food stamps or TANF for your children, your children can get free meals. If your total household income is the same or less than the amounts on the Income Chart below, your children may qualify to receive free meals or reduced price meals. A foster child may receive free or reduced-price meals regardless of your income. The reduced price for breakfast is .30 cents and .40 cents for lunch.

One of the ways your student may be eligible for the district's Pre-K program is to qualify for free or reduced price meals. Note: Until Free & Reduced Applications are approved in the Food Service Office, parents are responsible for any meals eaten. The length of time needed to approve or disapprove an application by the Food Service Office varies from 3-10 working days, depending on the time of year.

Federal Income Chart for School Year 2007-2008:

Parents may choose to pre-pay meals for their children. Bastrop ISD Food Services assigns all elementary students bar-coded ID's whereby meal purchases may be made. These cards work like debit cards, and parents may pay weekly, monthly or for an entire semester. Each time your child has a transaction in the cafeteria, the child's bar-code account is debited the amount of the transaction. Cafeteria monitors assigned to handle meal counting/purchasing have a computerized process that enables them to communicate to parents the status of each child's account. Notices may be sent home as reminders when a child's account gets low.

Secondary students will also have the ability to make transactions in the cafeteria using this debit system. However, due to the incidences of lost cards, Food Services will assign each secondary student an account that is accessed when the student uses their Student ID number at the time of their transaction.

We encourage parents to send checks with their children, whether they decide to use the debit system or "pay as you go". This will protect your child from lost or stolen money and give you, the parent, a receipt in the form of the canceled check.

The Texas Education Agency's Administrator's Reference Manual states the following: "Schools are not required to serve children who receive reduce-price or full-priced meals who do not have money to pay." It is the responsibility of the parent as well as the child to keep track of meal transactions. When an account is in arrears and all reasonable attempts by our staff have been made to collect money, we can deny a child a meal.

For more information contact Al Gaines, Child Nutrition Director at (512) 321-2292.

MEALS MAY NOT BE CHARGED

Absolutely no charges are allowed for snack type and a la carte items. The official policy of BISD Food Services is to disallow charges. However, we do recognize the need for flexibility. Children may lose their lunch money, forget their sack lunch from home, or other circumstances may arise. As long as there is communication from the parents, we will make efforts so that the child will not be hungry.