Improving School Meal Program Accuracy through Pre-ordering and Grab and Go Systems - SLT

Appendix D.1 - SFA/School Follow-up Script

Phone Script [will not be mailed]

<<Name>>, <<Title>>

<<School >>

First, we’d like to thank you for agreeing to be part of this study.

We wanted to set up a short meeting with you now that you’ve had a chance to review the recruitment information and the description of the research study. As you know, <<School name>> [or] <<SFA name>> was chosen to be part of this study because your schools are using the [name] pre-ordering app that allows students to pre-order school meals.

This study will test a series of changes in the ways that students select meals that are designed to increase the percent of trays that meet the requirements for reimbursement. FNS research has shown that the vast majority of meal claiming error occurs when a meal that is not reimbursable is incorrectly identified as a complete meal (i.e., that it contains all the required components). By increasing the number of complete meals that students select, meal claiming error will necessarily go down. Our goal is to test design modifications to the [name] pre-ordering app that your school currently uses to determine whether students’ desire for convenience can be used to increase reimbursable meal percentages and reduce meal claiming error.

We want to reiterate that we will not be trying to measure any type of meal claiming error and we will not be collecting any personal information about your students. Our focus is on understanding whether using an app and/or some type of expedited serving line results in an increase in the number of reimbursable meals that are presented to the cashiers.

This call was scheduled mainly to answer any questions you may have about the study, so before we continue, let’s pause to see if you have any questions for us.

[FNS will answer any questions the SFA or school has. If there are no questions, FNS will provide a couple of prompts to see if that generates any questions. Sample questions are provided below.]

Sample questions:

What data will be collected for the study?

Preliminary data will be collected to measure the percentage of reimbursable lunches that come to the cashiers before the intervention. We will not collect information on students, nor will we track whether the meal was paid, reduced-price, or free – these will simply be counts of reimbursable meals divided by the total number of meals served.

The schools in [SFA name] use a pre-ordering app. How long have you been using your current version of the app? Can you describe how the app works?

Is the app tied into the school’s student data base? Are there any requirements for using the app (for example, we’ve heard that in some schools, the app may only be used for ordering a reimbursable meal)? Does the app allow students to order any a la cart foods?

How are your Grab and Go lines currently working?

(for example, are these lines only for meals that are pre-ordered? Can students select a pre-assembled lunch that was not pre-ordered?)