Food Services

The North Colonie Central School District provides students and staff with a variety of well-balanced meal options inside our school cafeterias. 

One of our goals is to share the message of nutrition and wellness via our department’s website, which emphasizes the importance of nutrition and fitness while providing helpful learning tools to teachers, parents, and students.

Payments:

North Colonie uses Linq Connect as a secure and convenient way for parents to pay for their child’s meals. Once you create an account, you can:

• set up automatic payments
• make manual payments
• view account balances
• receive low balance notifications
• monitor your child’s spending
• view payment history

We encourage parents to take advantage of the option to prepay, as this helps our lunch lines go faster and gives our students more time to eat, relax and play.

School Meal Menus

All menus are regularly updated and can be viewed here.

Free and Reduced-Price Meals

North Colonie Central School District is able to offer free meals to all enrolled students for the next three years. This offering began on December 1, 2023 after the U.S. Department of Agriculture expanded its Community Eligibility Provision (CEP), allowing one free meal at breakfast and one free meal at lunch.

In order for a meal to be “free”, students must get the required components of a complete meal when going through the lunch line.  A complete meal is a minimum of three of the following: meat, meat alternate, fruit, vegetable, bread grain and milk. One of the three items must be a fruit or vegetable. This means that buying a single item (i.e. only an entrée or only milk) does not qualify.  Also, second helpings of food would not be covered as part of the free meals.   

Please note, in addition to providing free and reduced priced lunch, the Household Income Eligibility Form (formerly Free and Reduced Price Meal application) and Consent to Release forms also qualify students to receive other supports such as the weekend backpack program, assistance for the holidays, fee waivers for tests and college applications, and reduced fees for other programs (text books, school supplies, band and orchestra instruments, etc.)  

Though we do not require your completion of the form for free and reduced priced meals, we ask that you complete the Household Income Eligibility and Consent to Release forms if you feel you may qualify for and benefit from any of the above mentioned supports and return it North Colonie District Office at 91 Fiddlers Lane, Latham, NY 12110. If you do not qualify for free and reduced meals or are unsure, you and your family can still receive district supports. Reach out to your school social worker to see how we can help.

There are also hard copies of both forms available in your school’s main office or the Shaker High School Counseling Center.

Prohibition Against Meal Shaming

It is the district’s goal to provide students with access to nutritious no-cost or low-cost meals each school day and to ensure that a student whose parent/guardian has unpaid meal charges is not shamed or treated differently than a student whose parent/guardian does not have unpaid meal charges.

Meal Charge Policy

Although payment for school meals is typically due at the time of the sale (through a prepaid balance, cash or some other means), the North Colonie Central School District recognizes that at times, students are unable to make this payment for a variety of reasons. The district has established a school meal charge policy to provide clear information about how these situations will be handled, including steps designed to avoid any embarrassment of children.

View the district’s Meal Charge Policy.