More than 30 students at Uintah Elementary in Salt Lake City had their school lunches snatched away from them, CNN reported.
Salt Lake City School District officials said trays were taken away from some students at the elementary school because they had negative balances in the accounts used to pay for lunches, CNN reported.
Officials said the situation should have been handled differently.
"This was a mistake," Jason Olsen, a spokesman for the Salt Lake School District, told NBC News. "There shouldn't have been food taken away from these students once they went through that line."
The student's lunches were seized and thrown away after a district supervisor arrived at Uintah Elementary to investigate a large number of overdue lunch accounts, Olsen told the Associated Press. Students were given fruit and milk instead of regular lunches.
"She took my lunch away and said, 'Go get milk,'" fifth-grader Sophia Isom told NBC station KSL. "I came back and asked, 'What's going on?' Then she handed me an orange. She said, 'You don't have any money in your account, so you can't get lunch.'"
Parent Erica Lukes, Isom's mom, told the AP the incident was "humiliating and demoralizing."
"People are upset, obviously, by the way this has been handled because it's really needless and quite mean," she said. "Regardless if it's $2, $5, you don't go about rectifying a situation with a balance by having a child go through that."
The school district told reporters it started notifying parents via phone about negative account balances on Monday and Tuesday.
A Utah school cafeteria manager and a district supervisor have been placed on paid leave while officials investigate whether guidelines about notifying parents were followed.
"This situation could have and should have been handled in a different manner. We apologize," the Salt Lake City School District said on its Facebook page.
