Imagine being eight years old and getting your first taste of student debt.

Students at Alabama’s Gardendale Elementary School had the rudest possible introduction to this phenomenon back in 2016, when the school took to marking the arms of students unable to pay for lunch with a stamp that read, “I need lunch money.”

Similarly shocking stories can be found across the country.

This May, a Minnesota high school was accused of attempting to keep students from participating in graduation exercises if they owed lunch money. (A spokesperson for the school denied this was the case.) The state’s attorney general ultimately stepped in and declared that schools were prohibited from preventing eligible students from participating in graduation ceremonies due to unpaid meal debts. Just last month, Pennsylvania’s Wyoming West Valley school district came under fire after sending letters to parents of children who hadn’t paid their school lunch debt. The letter advised parents that they could be taken to court and have their children placed in foster care if the lunch debt wasn’t paid.

The cofounder and CEO of Philadelphia-headquartered La Colombe Coffee, Todd Carmichael, was among at least 100 donors who offered to pay the $22,467 debt. "I know what it's like to be shamed at school. I know what these things are. And I know how my mother would react if someone threatened to take her children away," he told NPR.The school initially declined his offer, but after outrage from the community, they accepted his money. In a note announcing the donation, the school district also apologized for the initial letter.

La Colombe isn’t the first company to swoop in and save the day. Chobani paid $47,650 in outstanding lunch debt in Rhode Island, and in June, the company donated $85,000 to pay off lunch debts in Idaho.

But the vast majority of American students can’t rely on checks from benevolent wealthy CEOs and corporations. The shame, emotional stress, and poverty — not to mention hunger — experienced by these children can take a real toll on their academic performance and well-being, child-development experts told Teen Vogue.

“From a physical-growth perspective, lunch shaming can impact disordered eating patterns and inadequate intake, particularly if a child is more prone to skipping a midday meal altogether rather than risk inability to meet the financial expectations,” Bridget Murphy, a registered dietitian at New York University’s Hassenfeld Children’s Hospital, told Teen Vogue. “This stigmatization can shape overall nutrition, impacting proper growth, particularly as children approach and enter puberty.”

There are additional psychological effects. “We know from starvation studies that hunger negatively impacts concentration, particularly on demanding, long-duration tasks,” Andrea Vazzana, a clinical psychologist at NYU’s Hassenfeld Children’s Hospital, told Teen Vogue. “In short, your brain is fueled by glucose, and low availability of glucose can cause short-term cognitive impairments. You can see how a chronically malnourished child would be less alert and attentive in class, less likely to process and retain important building blocks of learning, and over time, less likely to succeed academically.”

According to a 2018 survey of 1,550 school districts nationwide, 75.3% reported unpaid student meal debt at the end of 2016-2017 school year. The survey, conducted by the School Nutrition Association, found debt at one school as high as $865,000, with a median debt amount of $2,500 across all schools, ABC News reported.

In 2017, the US Agriculture Department began requiring school districts to have policies concerning student lunch debt, but they didn’t specify how districts should recover debts. So some schools have continued using methods such as stamping children, threatening to have children put in foster care, and even using collection agencies.