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How My School Menu works

My School Menu is an independent index of the breakfast and lunch menus that public school districts already publish online. It is not run by, or affiliated with, any school district or any of the menu platforms named below. Every menu here was written by a district's nutrition department; this site only collects them and shows them one school at a time.

Where the menus come from

Districts publish menus through a handful of platforms. For each district we record which one it uses and read the menu from that platform's public menu pages or the data feed behind them - the same data the district's own menu page loads. The platforms currently read are:

Some districts publish only a PDF or an image of the month's calendar on their own website. Those files are downloaded from the district's site and either parsed into a day-by-day menu or shown as the original file, with a link back to where it was found. A district page always names the source it was read from.

What is copied

For each school and meal: the dates a meal is served, the menu items on each date in the order the district lists them, section headings such as "Entrees" or "Sides", and, where the platform provides them, the serving size, calories, nutrition figures and allergen flags attached to an item. Items are shown as written by the district; nothing is renamed or reordered.

School names, addresses and grade bands come from the same platform, or from the district's website. School and district logos are taken from district websites and are used only to identify the school on its page; a district that would rather not have its logo shown can ask for it to be removed and a plain placeholder is shown instead.

How often menus are refreshed

Refreshing is automatic and runs on a fixed schedule (times are UTC):

03:30 - the school list and meal types of every district are re-read, so schools that opened, closed or were renamed are picked up.
04:30 - the next four weeks of menus are pulled for every school.
10:15 - the current week is pulled again, to catch same-day changes.
05:30 - schools whose district lists them but has published no menu are hidden until a menu appears.

Districts that publish PDFs do not refill themselves: their next month is added by hand once the district posts it, which is normally in the last week of the month before.

A pull only ever replaces the days it received. If a platform is down or returns nothing for a week, the days already shown are kept rather than deleted, and the page notes when the menu was last confirmed.

What "no menu" means

A day with no items means the district had nothing published for that day when it was last read - a holiday, a day the platform has not been filled in yet, or a school that serves no meal that day. A school page that says the district has not published a menu for the month is exactly that: the district's own feed was empty. The page stays so the school can be found, and fills in on the next refresh after the district publishes.

Pages, caching and accuracy

Pages are generated from the copied data and cached for up to fifteen minutes, so a change a district makes in the morning appears here within about an hour of the next scheduled pull. Districts change menus without notice, and substitutions are made in the cafeteria on the day. Treat what is here as the district's plan, not a guarantee of what is served. Anyone managing a food allergy should confirm ingredients with the school's nutrition office; allergen flags are shown only when the district publishes them, and their absence does not mean an item is free of an allergen.

Emails, calendars and downloads

The email reminders, the .ics calendar feed and the PDF download on each school page are built from the same copied data at the time they are requested or sent. They carry the same limits: they reflect the district's published menu as of the last refresh.

Corrections and removals

If a menu here does not match what your district publishes, the fastest fix is usually the next refresh. If it is still wrong after a day, or if you represent a district and want a school, a logo or a menu taken down, use the contact address in the footer with the school's page address and what is wrong.

See also the privacy policy and terms of use.