School Nutrition Q & A

Milk is required to be offered at every meal, however, it can be declined.

What constitutes a breakfast?

• Entrée (grain)
• Milk
• Fruit or Juice
• Additional Item

Students may choose not to take 1 of the 4 items, however, they must take 3 of the 4 items and one item must be a fruit or juice.

What constitutes a lunch?

• Meat/Meat Alternate
• Grain
• Vegetable
• Fruit
• Milk

Students may choose not to take 2 of the groups, however, they must take at least 3 of the 5 groups (one must be a serving of a fruit or vegetable). Milk may be an item they choose to eliminate.

The Cherokee County School Nutrition Program accepts prepayments on student accounts in several different ways.

• You may send cash in an envelope to school with your child. Make sure that you have clearly marked the envelope with the student's name, student id number, homeroom teacher and the amount that is enclosed in the envelope.
• You may send payments to school in the form of a check. Make sure that all checks are clearly marked with the student's name and student id number.
• We also accept payments via the internet. This can be done by accessing our third-party vendor's web address of https://linqconnect.com/  More information regarding this service can be found under the "prices & payment" tab.
• If you are pre-paying for more than one student and you are not using the on-line payment method, please be sure to send a separate envelope to school with each child.

Payments made by check must have the following information either printed or written on the check*:

• Full Name Street Address (including city, state, and zip)
• Phone Number
• Students name or ID number

All children are permitted to buy extra/ala carte items from their meal accounts until the Cafeteria manager is notified in writing otherwise.  Gateway has a question regarding extra/ala carte purchases.  Parents are required to answer yes or no to either allow or deny their child permission to purchase extra/ala carte from their meal account.

By subscribing to LinQConnect you can view your student's meal history with enough detail to indicate if extra items outside of a normal meal are purchased (such as cookies, desserts, snacks, extra helpings, etc). Using this resource as an educational tool, parents should be able to reinforce their students to choose proper items at mealtime.

Any money left in the account at the end of the school year will be kept in that account, allowing the student to use those funds at the beginning of the next school year.

Once the enrollment clerk at the school enrolls the transferred student, the student's lunch account (including any account balance they may have) will automatically transfer to the student's new school cafeteria within 24hrs.

This applies to transfers during the school year, but also applies to transfers that happen over the summer due to students graduating from Elementary or Middle schools.

The only product we serve that has peanuts listed as a product ingredient are the commercially, individually wrapped Smuckers Peanut Butter & Jelly Sandwich.  However, some manufacturers of the products we use may produce a product in a facility that may contain peanuts.