Tasks that Took Hours Now Take Minutes for IOWC Schools (VA)

Overview
Isle of Wight County (IOWC) School District hosts 5,500 students serving 4,000 meals per day, across nine schools in rural areas of Virginia.

District Obstacles
When Pearl Taylor, Director of IOWC Food Services, began working for the district, each school used cash registers with paper and pencil rosters to record sales. There was no standard cafeteria management system. For a brief period, one of the schools within the district attempted to make the switch to a computer to manage cafeteria accounts. However, the school was forced to revert back to its old system when the new software became too difficult to manage. Applications were also handled manually, constantly being sorted by school staff members. All of these issues were compounded by the rural nature of the district and its nearly thirty mile spread between some schools within the county. The system made it too easy for errors, such as not providing accurate meal counts, to be made. Overall, it lacked efficiency and slowed everything down.

Finding the Answer
The district was required to consolidate Free and Reduced applications to one central location in the Food Service Office—an office that was previously managed by a single person. This involved daily printing of rosters and lots of faxing to keep the schools up-to-date on each application. Needless to say, this was requiring a numerous amount of additional hours to manage the old system. It was time to make the switch, so the district decided to turn to Meals Plus for help.

Results
After the implementation of the Meals Plus cafeteria software system, Isle of Wight County Schools immediately noticed an optimization in speed and efficiency towards managing student accounts. Reporting and controlling information was simplified by merging everything into one database, eliminating nightly downloads and ensuring that one student would never have two different statuses. Free and Reduced applications were all centralized to the food service office, which eliminated the need for constant faxing of student names. Students can now receive their benefits before their parents even receive notice. The school district also added a time keeping feature that Mrs. Taylor raves, “Payroll used to take me at least six hours per week and now I can complete it in minutes!”