Aramark reports meal participation, summer food bus and community feeding efforts to Lorain board
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Summary
Aramark told the board the food service provider served hundreds of thousands of school meals last year, expanded summer and dinner programs for youth and offers tools for parents to manage student accounts; staff highlighted a free evening meal program for anyone under 18 and community partnerships.
Aramark representatives updated the Lorain City Schools Board of Education on Aug. 25 about school‑meal participation, summer feeding and community partnerships, and described tools and menu changes planned for 2025‑26.
Frank Korpetic, the district general manager for Aramark, and nutrition director Lee Zacharias presented participation figures and program details. They said lunch participation totaled about 750,000 student lunches across the reported period and highlighted a district dinner program that provides a free evening meal to any person under 18 at Lorain High School on school evenings from about 2:30 p.m. to 5 p.m.
Zacharias described the dinner program to the meeting and emphasized it is available to anyone in the community under 18, not only enrolled students. "It's at Lorain High, any school day or any school evening ... and it's anyone in the community under 18 years old to receive a free meal," he said.
Summer and outreach: Aramark said it operated a food bus for summer feeding, visiting neighborhood parks daily; the company reported 733 breakfasts served at a high‑school site and larger lunch pickup numbers (about 1,480 lunches in June and about 2,100 in July at the sites reported). Aramark also noted its supplier and community partnerships, including work with Second Harvest Food Bank and local donation drives (Stuff the Bus), and said it has maintained a vendor presence at school open houses so families can ask nutrition staff questions directly.
Menu offerings and services: the vendor said K‑12 menus meet USDA nutrition guidelines, offer multiple choices (students may select up to five components), limited‑time items and carved‑meat stations at the high school. Parents may use MyPaymentsPlus to prepay student accounts and NutriSlice to view menus, ingredient information and bilingual content.
Free second‑item reporting: Aramark staff cited counts for complimentary "second" items served from funds restricted to child nutrition: roughly 10,000 hot vegetable seconds, 54,000 second juices, 22,860 second milks, 143,000 meals served to homeless students (term used by speaker), and about 105,000 second entrées. The vendor said those meals are paid from funds that can only be spent on feeding children.
Ending: Board members thanked Aramark for the report and partnership; no formal action was taken during the presentation.
