Efforts to improve the quality of school lunch programs on Island moved a step forward this week when the Up-Island Regional School District backed a plan to renovate and expand the kitchen at the West Tisbury School.

The school committee will put $100,000 in next year’s budget for the project. The kitchen expansion will allow the school to prepare food on the premises for West Tisbury and Chilmark. Currently the two up-Island elementary schools contract for food service with the regional high school from the company Chartwells, which transports lunches to the schools.

School committee member Jeffrey (Skipper) Manter 3rd, ordinarily an outspoken critic of extra spending, made the motion to put the $100,000 in the draft budget.

“We don’t want to just crank out 400 cafeteria-type lunches,” he said.

The renovations would bring the kitchen up to code to use as a primary cooking facility and give the schools the option of exiting the Chartwells contract at the end of the school year. Preliminary estimates from the South Mountain Company peg the cost of the kitchen renovation at $81,400. School committee members said they supported the kitchen renovation but need more information on what it would cost to leave the contract.

In related business on Monday night, the school committee reviewed a draft 2013 budget of $8.9 million, a 4.3 per cent increase over last year. The committee is due to vote on the budget on Dec. 19.

Parents, teachers and elected officials attended the meeting to speak in favor of the kitchen renovation.

“We all want our kids to be healthy and a big place our children learn about this is at a school,” said Island Grown Schools coordinator Noli Hoye Taylor. “It’s expensive to invest in a lunch program but it’s a lot more expensive not to invest in lunch program . . . fundamentally it’s a moral choice to consider who do we want to be trusted in feeding our kids,” she added.

“I’m very supportive of all this,” said Teri Mello, a teacher. “The kitchen should have been done a long time ago . . . to me it’s correcting a situation that should never had been a situation.”

West Tisbury selectman Cynthia Mitchell agreed. “I’m really supportive of the idea; I think it’s great, both phases of it,” she said. “There is the reality of how you’re going to pay for it and it’s got to fit in to the overall budget and not cause such an increase. But I think it’s a priority.”

In recent years the West Tisbury School has been approved to cook soups on site and also received a grant from Whole Foods for a new salad bar, which has proved to be extremely popular.