Case Study: Charleston County School District
“Very simply, it works. Tech issues at the cafeteria level have dropped by 95%. The system is comprehensive, easy to use, requires very little maintenance and puts minimal demand on the district technology staff. Meals Plus has truly designed a system that works for our cafeteria staff. And as good as the school cafeteria software is, their support is even better!”
-Walter Campbell
Food Services Director
Overview
Charleston County School District is South Carolina’s second largest school district. CCSD has an enrollment of more than 42,000 students in 86 schools spread over an area of nearly 1,000 square miles. Each day CCSD Food Services’ 400 employees serve 30,000 meals to an economically diverse student population.
District Obstacles
CCSD Food Services staff was spending an inordinate amount of time trouble shooting its software system. System processes were complicated and cumbersome. Data was unreliable and difficult to access leaving management without information critical to sound decision making. For new staff the system was hard to learn and support from the existing vendor was slow.
Finding the Answer
Charleston County needed a system that would increase uptime, ensure data accuracy, be easy to learn and use and wouldn’t require a high level of technical expertise and attention to maintain. CCSD wanted cafeteria technology that was more reliable and compatible with other district business software systems. After evaluating systems from several major national K12 cafeteria technology vendors, CCSD selected Meals Plus’ enterprise management package.
Results
After a limited roll-out , supervisors were impressed and eagerly adopted an aggressive “train the trainer” approach for deployment district wide. In fewer than 60 days all 86 sites were smoothly transitioned from the old system to the Meals Plus school cafeteria POS system. Since then, software related technical issues at the cafeterias have been reduced by more than 95%. Reports at the district office match reports at the schools and can be generated in minutes rather than hours. Information can be shared easily with other departments in a timely fashion and whenever help is needed it’s available. Most importantly, CCSD’s cafeteria software system is now an asset to the department.
Thanks to a new federal program, nearly 30 schools in North Carolina will offer free breakfast to their students. According to a recent article from The News & Observer, less than half of student that qualify for free or reduced lunch take advantage of a free breakfast. The new “No Kid Hungry” program allows students to eat breakfast either in the classroom or in to-go bags. This is important – because studies have shown that schools that implement a breakfast in the classroom program produce better-behaved students with higher grades and attendance rates.
