We sat down with Nicole Conley, LINQ board member, Managing Director at Siebert Williams Shank, and former Chief Finance, Business and Operations Officer at Austin ISD. During her tenure, her district operated one of the largest food operations in Austin out of school buildings during a pandemic.
Hungry kids can’t focus. That’s why school nutrition is the foundation beneath everything else a district is trying to accomplish. Families facing food insecurity carry that burden into every part of their lives and it shows up in attendance, behavior, and academic outcomes.
During the COVID pandemic, Nicole Conley ran what was essentially the largest take-out restaurant operation in Austin, Texas out of school buildings. Her team fed families for nearly two years straight, sending backpacks of food home with kids who needed them. When FEMA came looking for a model, they asked for her spreadsheets.
That story says something important about how Nicole thinks about nutrition. Not as a program to manage, but as a responsibility that sits at the very core of what a school district is for.
Kids Can’t Learn on an Empty Stomach
“No school district leader worth their salt will say they don’t need a good nutritional program. We know that kids need to eat in order to learn.”
Nicole points to research that confirms what every teacher and school counselor already knows: food insecurity affects everything. When a student hasn’t eaten, it compounds. Chronic food insecurity affects concentration, behavior, social development, and long-term academic trajectory.
For a CFO, that means the nutrition program is as foundational to student outcomes as a working roof or a functioning school district payroll system. When it works well, everything else has a better chance of working too.
What COVID Made Undeniable
When schools closed in March 2020, districts across the country faced an immediate crisis: millions of children who depended on school meals suddenly had no access to them. For Nicole and her team at Austin ISD, it was a problem they knew they had to solve.
They launched a years-long operation that looked less like a school program and more like emergency disaster relief. Schools became distribution centers. Staff who had never worked in food service showed up. They built logistics from scratch, in real time, for a community counting on them.
Nicole stayed up nights with her food services director, tracking every meal, every backpack, and every family served. The mission was simple:
- Make sure no child in the district went hungry
- Help families feel more secure during the most destabilizing event of their lives
- Run a sustainable operation
The lesson Nicole took from that experience was about what a school nutrition program really is when you strip away the program language: it’s a promise to families. And keeping that promise requires infrastructure that holds up under pressure.
At LINQ, We Know Feeding Kids Is Part of the Mission
LINQ’s nutrition solution is built for the full complexity of K-12 food service, from digital meal accounts and free and reduced eligibility management to point-of-sale operations and federal reporting. It’s designed to help nutrition programs run efficiently, stay compliant, and close the year without raiding the general fund.
LINQ Payments extends that further, giving families a single, simple way to manage meal account balances alongside other school fees which reduces the friction that can stand between a student and a meal.
Want to see how districts are running leaner, more efficient nutrition programs?
Nicole Conley sat on both sides of the ERP decision as a CFO managing a $3 billion budget and as a LINQ board member. Her advice: go in prepared. LINQ’s Guide to K-12 ERP walks you through everything you need to evaluate, ask, and plan for, so you can move forward with confidence.