DENVER — Starting next school year, $8,797,135 will be available for school districts across Colorado to use for increased wages and stipends for frontline school nutrition employees through the Healthy School Meals for All Wage Increase and Stipend Grant.
The Colorado Department of Education (CDE) defines eligible workers as staff who spend 70% of their time preparing, cooking and serving meals to students.
The deadline for school districts to apply for this grant is Thursday, June 4.
Healthy School Meals for All was approved by voters in 2022 through Proposition FF, which raised $116.2 million for free school meals.
The CDE said grant programs were supposed to start in the 2024-2025 school year, but because of the popularity of the program, revenue was only able to cover the meal reimbursement portion, not grants.
It wasn’t until Proposition LL and MM were approved in November 2025 that enough funding was secured to cover both meal reimbursements and the grant programs.
“This was always the plan, but until the funding was there in the pool, we couldn’t really get strategic about what that meant,” said Lindsey Long, the community outreach & engagement regional coordinator and registered dietitian with Denver Public Schools (DPS).
Long had just hit submit on DPS’ application Wednesday morning, and shared her excitement with Denver7 about being able to provide an extra paycheck for staff within the district.
“Now it’s not just like you’re awesome, you love feeding the kids, good job, it’s like we’re compensating you, we’re acknowledging your effort in a way that’s like tangible and is going to help you outside of your job,” Long said.
Director for Food and Nutrition Services with the Cherry Creek School District Kim Kilgore shared that same excitement.
“It’ll make a huge impact for our staff, who are some of the lowest paid staff in the district,” Kilgore explained.
It is up to school districts to decide how they disburse the funds to their eligible employees.
DPS, which will receive about $891,000, will disburse the funds evenly among the 550 eligible employees.
Long said it will come out to about one extra paycheck given out at the end of the school year.
“We’re going to use it for is to drive performance,” Long explained. “You had an awesome health and safety inspection from the health department. You have higher participation, meaning more students are eating in your kitchen. You are reducing food waste. You’re getting your kids to compost, so that’s some, but not limited to like there’s a whole list of probably 15 different factors that we’re going to measure on and our plan is that with all the different performance metrics that we have every single employee will be eligible for the stipend so then it’ll be distributed evenly across the employees,” she said.
And she said thought went into giving the check at the end of the school year, noting that the hope is to help staff get through what may be slower summer months when employee have less work hours.
On the other hand, Cherry Creek, plans to divvy up their fund into two checks for their 338 eligible staff, giving them one check of $650 in January and another check of $650 in July.
Cherry Creek School District will be receiving about $519,000 from this grant.
“We have put together some qualification criteria, and really it’s based around attendance and meeting our minimum expectations,” Kilgore said. “It’s a very high demand job, it’s very physical, you’re on your feet all day long, you’re in a hot kitchen, hot kitchen, cooking, and you have to know things like special diets and food allergies, and there’s just so much more to it than just serving kids.”
Kilgore said the district also applied for the local foods grant which she says will give the district $1.2 million for next year to go towards providing locally grown and produced foods.
“We’re very excited because these grants will really help meet the needs of our students and our program,” Kilgore exclaimed.
The CDE said during the 2025-2026 school year, it saw an average of 185,000 breakfasts served daily and 441,000 lunches served daily.
At the time of this publication, the CDE said 127 of Colorado’s 196 eligible school districts have either submitted an application or are actively working on one.
The CDE confirmed that includes Jefferson County, Douglas County and Aurora school districts.
The CDE says the amount available will vary each year and is based on the March revenue projections for the Healthy School Meals for All fund and the reserve percentage of the fund.
They add that school districts can expect to receive $0.06 and $0.12 per lunch based on lunches served two school years prior. Every participating district will receive at least $3,000 even if their calculated amount is lower.
