LEWISTON — Robert V. Connors Elementary celebrated national school lunch week Wednesday, serving students lunch prepared mostly with local ingredients.

Over the next five years, area schools will benefit from a $8.5 million U.S. Department of Agriculture grant that intends to make sure locally grown food maintains a strong presence in nutrition programs.

“Maine was the second state in the country to offer meals at no charge to public students and continues to be one of only eight states in the country,” according to Jane McLucas, child nutrition director at the Maine Department of Education.

Auburn Public Schools is the leading partner in the area. The grant comes through a shared effort with a Brunswick-based nonprofit, Full Plates Full Potential. The grant amount was previously announced as $7.4 million, which has came up to $8.5 million with additional investments now. As a part of the project, Auburn Public Schools will be receiving $623,970 to establish a food processing hub within the combined school districts of Auburn, Lewiston and Lisbon.

The grant has opened new territory for several local partners.

“It’s been a learning process for us organizationally. This is the first time many (partners) have ever done a federal grant like this,” Justin Strasburger, executive director at Full Plates Full Potential, said Wednesday. “A lot of this is building off of work that’s been happening already. It is huge in terms of not having it feel like it’s falling on any one partner or any one group. That collaboration has helped to ease some of the pain points.”

Low operating margins are one of the pain points, Strasburger pointed out. “It’s meant to cover the cost, but it barely covers the cost of the food and the operations.”

“It’s difficult if you want to get more local ingredients that might cost more. If you want to be able to process those ingredients, you might need a piece of equipment. That’s not built into budgets, it’s not built into school budgets,” Strasburger said. “In Lewiston, for example, this school food program gets zero dollars from the city of Lewiston. It is all funded by the reimbursements. What that means is that if you want to do innovation, it’s hard to do that on your own.”