It was lunchtime one school day in February, and Don Re’s 13-year-old daughter was looking forward to eating the hot French dip sandwich sitting on her lunch tray.

But when she got to the front of the cafeteria line to pay for her lunch, the food service worker at La Salle Springs Middle School in the Rockwood school district didn’t let her eat the sandwich, Re said, because she owed $2.20 in her meal account. So, according to the father, the worker took her food to throw it away and gave her a cold American cheese sandwich, in front of other students.

But Re’s daughter can’t handle dairy well. So she ate nothing.

Re called the principal and Rockwood’s superintendent, Eric Knost. Re said he was upset because his daughter shouldn’t have had to pay for his mistake of forgetting to put money in her account. He said he didn’t see the point of wasting untouched food just to offer a nutritionally inferior cheese sandwich.

“No normal human being capable of empathy thinks it’s right to take food from kids, so let’s find a better way,” Re wrote in a Facebook post about the incident.