The Herricks Union Free School District is bringing its cafeterias into the 21st century.
The district’s Board of Education Thursday night unanimously approved a program for electronic school meal payments.
Expected to go live Oct. 26, it will let parents load money onto an online account to pay for their children’s lunch rather than using cash or checks.
The price of each meal will be deducted from the account whenever a student goes through the lunch line. Parents can check the balance at any time, and money left over at the end of the year will carry over to the next year.
The program, MySchoolBucks by Indiana-based Heartland Payment Systems, charges a $1.95 fee each time money is loaded onto an account.
Parents can pay $12.95 for a single child or $26.95 for a family for unlimited transactions.
The logistics of how students will pay are still somewhat uncertain.
Herricks High School students will swipe their school ID cards, said Helen Costigan, assistant superintendent for business, during Thursday’s meeting at the Herricks Community Center. One option for elementary schools is for teachers to give cashiers a list of the students who are buying lunch each day.
The district started wiring its schools for the system over the summer, Costigan said. There may be some overlap with the analog system, she said; parents will still be able to pay for meals by check after MySchoolBucks goes live.
In the future, the district wants to use MySchoolBucks for other payments, such as AP test fees and driver’s education classes.
Schools in the Mineola, East Williston, Roslyn, Manhasset and Sewanhaka districts currently offer electronic lunch payments.
The Herricks school lunch committee had asked them for a few years, Costigan said, but the board couldn’t allocate the $125,000 to make it happen until this year.
“They’re very happy about it, and I think once it gets going they’re going to love it,” she said.
Parent Jodi Nagle said she thinks MySchoolBucks will make lunch payments smoother, since she can check the account balance any time.
“I think it’s great because my son,” who attends Herricks Middle School, “loses his lunch ticket all the time,” she said.
