Can you imagine having a hot lunch ripped away from your child at school just as he’s on the checkout line in the cafeteria?

He’s probably pretty hungry (and didn’t eat breakfast). Can’t wait to eat after a morning packed with classes. So the clerk checks his tray, checks your balance at the register and — oops — see that it’s in the red.

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Now your kid’s out of luck. Hot lunch becomes cold. There, that’ll teach you.

Or worse yet, what if your child gets no lunch at all because of your financial delinquency? That’s happened, too.

These are exactly the blunt scenarios that pushed a Pittsburgh school employee to quit her job because the “lunch shaming” policy she was forced to enact was taking food out of kids’ mouths.

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Parents should pay what they owe and what’s required, of course. That’s a given. But should hungry kids have to suffer because their parents owe money on the lunch account? Something’s off there.

Stacy Koltiska, who worked for two years at the Canon McMillan School District in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, told the local CBS affiliate her elementary school was basically shaming kids at lunch in a blatant attempt to get their parents to pay up on overdrawn lunch accounts. The policy distressed her so much that she quit her job just weeks into the new school year.

Koltiska had worked at Wylandville Elementary School in the cafeteria. She resigned after she had to rip hot meals away from two children.

“There has to be a better way than involving the children,” said the worker.

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“His eyes welled up with tears,” she said of one boy. “I’ll never forget the look on his face,” she told CBS Pittsburgh.

The new policy in the district was approved over the summer for grades K-6. It requires the hot meal to be replaced by a sandwich if parents owe $25 or more on their child’s meal account — meaning they’d get a plain cheese sandwich instead of a steaming hot chicken dish. For older kids, it’s even worse — they get no lunch at all if the debt is $25.

The strict policy was enforced “the very first week of school,” the cafeteria worker said. And once she saw how the children were humiliated and embarrassed (not to mention hungry), she’d had enough.

School policy also requires that the food taken away from kids must be immediately trashed.

The school district said parents were told by email or by written letter of the new policy back in August. The superintendent of schools, Matthew Daniels, said it was all about collecting money owed by more than 300 families before the new policy, according to the CBS report. Now that number is down to 66.

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He said the new policy was not meant “to shame or embarrass a child,” according to media reports.

The cafeteria worker who saw the kids up close each day begs to differ. “I’m not saying the parents shouldn’t be held accountable, but I think there has to be a better way than involving the children,” Koltiska said.