What is wrong with people? 

Perhaps you heard. Cafeteria workers in Richfield, Minnesota were reprimanded recently after they snatched hot lunches away from about 40 kids whose parents were more than 15 bucks in arrears.

Wait. It gets worse.

These lunch ladies (and men if there were any) THREW THE FOOD AWAY, handing the embarrassed kids cold lunches.

This is wrong on so many levels it’s hard to know where to begin.

Adults humiliating kids is sick. Shaming students in front of their friends because their parents owe lunch money is cruel.

Throwing away perfectly good food rather than letting kids eat it?

Mean and unspeakably wasteful. 

I rarely call for folks to lose their jobs. This is an exception.

Fire their derrières. Sack every single person who took part in this sadistic exercise.

I don’t care if the parents owed $10,000, there’s no excuse for this.

Look, almost all school divisions struggle with unpaid lunch bills. According to the State of School Nutrition, approximately 71 percent of school districts have student lunch debt ranging from $2 to $4.7 million.

Lunchroom IOUs were in the news here in Virginia Beach a few years ago when the total amount owed reached a whopping $237,268. Unacceptable.

Remember, these are not families that qualify for free or reduced lunches. These are full-freight parents who simply don’t pay their bills. Some schools, like Richfield, apparently, substitute cold for hot lunches when parents are in arrears.

Not a great solution. At the Beach, the schools continue to give kids a hot lunch, but send delinquencies to collection agencies.

Surely we can all agree that people should pay their bills. But kids have no control over their parents. They shouldn’t be punished for the bad behavior of their mothers and fathers.

As for yanking hot lunches out of the hands of hungry kids and throwing the food away? This cannot be tolerated.

These depraved cafeteria creeps should be working in a prison mess, not a school lunchroom.