Yes and no? You can’t buy the food at school with cash. So just opting out of the system isn’t possible.
Cash has to be taken to the cafeteria before lunch to be entered into the system so the kids need a special pass to run down and take care of it. Mine are really bad at remembering this and at the start of the year when every family is trying to put cash in, there can be massive delays.
The most interesting boggle about the new system is they didn’t include any way to transfer lunch balance between kids in the family and apparently that was a big issue for a lot of families. Seems that many people would give the cash deposit to the oldest kid and then use the old system to redistribute the money to the younger kids in the family later.
Oooo! Do Guaifenesin next! That also has basically no evidence of effectiveness despite being on the market for ages.