RANCHESTER, Wyo. – North Carolina’s Haywood County schools are celebrating biscuits.

“There are some people who won’t eat a whole grain biscuit because it does not look like the biscuit that grandma made them throughout the years,” associate superintendent Bill Nolte told the Associated Press.

The school sent out a press release recently announcing that “Buttermilk biscuits are back.”

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Haywood County is the first in North Carolina to gain a waiver from the federal lunch regulations requiring that all schools serve 100 percent whole grain breads. Across the state, food regulations imposed on schools through Michelle Obama’s Healthy, Hunger Free Kids Act have resulted in students buying 12.6 million fewer meals over the past two years, the Associated Press reports.

Nolte said the problem is both that the food prepared under the food restrictions doesn’t taste too good, and a stipulation that all students take a fruit or vegetable is creating massive waste.

“We’re spending hundreds and hundreds of dollars every day throwing away perfectly good food,” Nolte said. “And what we would like to do is not to be punished if we put the fruit on the line and let the kids pick it up. If they want the banana or the apple or the pear or whatever the fruit is, they can pick it up and eat it.”

In Haywood County, the school lunch participation dropped about 5 percent when the new regulations went into effect, but in other parts of the state, like Madison County, it was a double digit decrease.

“The number of lunches served declined by 13.5 percent and the number of breakfast meals declined by 14.4 percent, according to Elizabeth Ayers, school nutrition director for Madison County Schools.

It’s a problem facing schools across the country, and many have had enough.

A Wyoming school district that dropped its high schools from the National School Lunch Program is so pleased with the results it’s planning to remove all of its schools from the program.

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Lunchroom food sales jumped about 25 percent, from $1,500 per day to roughly $2,000 per day, at the Sheridan County School District’s secondary schools after officials ditched the National School Lunch Program last year over complications with tight food restrictions championed by first lady Michelle Obama, The Sheridan Press reports.

The district grew tired of struggling to comply with the new restrictions on calories, fat, sugar, sodium, whole wheat, and other nutritional aspects that rendered cafeteria fare unappetizing to students. The move meant the district was forced to give up federal subsidies for free and reduced-price lunches through the National School Lunch Program, but it also freed school food workers to craft homemade meals students will actually buy and eat.

Now, district officials are looking to move Big Horn Elementary School in the same direction, and will withdraw the school from the federal program next year. District business manager Jeremy Smith told the news site officials hope improved revenues from that decision will help to off-set federal subsidies for Tongue River Elementary School to do the same in the future.

Tongue River will be the last school in the district still participating in the National School Lunch Program next year.

“What we understand and know is that we need to increase the participation at Big Horn Elementary in order to fund Tongue River Elementary’s potential exit from the National School Lunch Program,” Smith said.

“The free and reduced enrollment is simply too high at TRE and generates too great of a subsidy to simply abandon it without some sort of assurance that we can somehow fund that so that it isn’t a continued drain on the general fund. This is an experiment year and it will be very important the BHE hit an 80 percent participation rate or higher in order to fund TRE’s withdrawal.”

Smith said just under 60 percent of students at Big Horn Elementary currently purchase a lunch. Sixty percent is the break-even point for Big Horn, so the 20 percent increase would cover the federal funds lost if Tongue River ditches Michelle O’s lunches.

The district’s plan is to start with its own lunches at Big Horn while a new elementary is constructed with better facilities than Tongue River’s cramped kitchen, and then to transition to the new school while opting out of the National School Lunch Program.

“The size of their school now dictates that you simply could not offer a more flexible a la carte program,” Smith told The Sheridan Press. “The gym and cafeteria have to be separate spaces with that number of students. We want to wait until the new facilities are constructed to ensure they have the proper space and equipment necessary to properly move to a new program.”

Big Horn Elementary is among a wave of hundreds of public schools across the country that have opted out of the federal lunch program since the Michelle Obama-inspired restrictions went into effect in 2012.

USA Today highlighted several schools that left last fall.

“The calorie limitations and types of foods that have to be provided … have resulted in the kids just saying ‘I’m not going to eat that,’ ” Fort Thomas Independent Schools Superintendent Gene Kirchner told the news site.

The national School Nutrition Association reports that one million fewer students eat lunch at school than before the new regulations went into effect. And then there’s the additional $1 billion per year in food waste tied to the edict that every child must take a fruit or vegetable, whether they want it or not.

“I’m lucky my daughter will eat her vegetables. But it was very wasteful from what I’ve seen from being in the cafeteria,” Fort Thomas parent Andi Sempier told USA Today. “And the lunch purchases have fallen off. That’s a huge indicator it’s not working.”