Story #40: Forgive *This*

I am not ashamed to tell you that I owe a lot of money. Horrified, yes, but ashamed, no. You see, I--like many people--went to college, and the summer before my senior year my parents' employment situation changed, and so to finance my fourth and final undergrad year of out-of-state tuition I took out a loan. Then, two years later, I went to graduate school. I was an in-state student that time, but still I was working as a teacher and going to night school, and teaching salaries in the state of Iowa at that time were $100 a day. So, I took out another loan and added it to the first.

Fast forward four years. By now I had moved to California and gotten a handful of years in the classroom under my belt, and so I went back to grad school for good this time. Not the dabbling, inquiry-based approach I took the first time but a rigorous, three-year, full-time, thesis-requiring, dual-credential-awarding program. Again, on a teacher's salary and by this time I was also paying dot-com-era rent on a studio in San Francisco. So I filed another FAFSA and took out my third loan and when I saw the numbers on the page, knew I could not even conceive of ever being able to pay off that much money but also knew that saving up for graduate school tuition would never happen either. So signed my promissory note and dove in.

Seven years have now passed since I walked across the stage that foggy, chilly May day at San Francisco State and received my Masters degree. I have very diligently paid my student loan every month since then. The balance goes down but the hole in my budget where the monthly payment comes from remains. So, as part of my Spring Break to-do list I decided to contact my lender and ask about loan forgiveness programs for teachers.

You hear about them all the time in our line of work: teach in an urban public school system and your loans can be forgiven, work with high-risk populations and your debts will melt away before you know it. So I called today and spoke with Michelle, my representative, only to be told that my loans do not qualify. You see, only loans taken out since October, 1998, are eligible for the federal loan forgiveness program. But, she suggested helpfully, maybe my state offers programs like this for teachers?

I hung up, discouraged. My state's budget is such a mess that there isn't even enough money for me to have a job next year at this point. Pay back my student loans for me? Please. And, further Internet research shows that not even the lion's share of my loan, taken out since the eligibility date, qualifies for forgiveness because I consolidated my loans in 2004 and now it is just one big amount that I will never pay off.

Much is reported in the media about teachers leaving the profession. In California, the attrition rate for new teachers is greater than 50% in the first five years. But, I am not the teacher who spends a few years in the classroom and then goes to work in retail or sales or marketing or or or. Education is the only professional practice I have ever had and will ever have. Both my parents were teachers, my brother is a teacher, and I am a teacher too. I do not plan to leave teaching for a higher-paying position, even though--as I posted last year in the blog I wrote during my sabbatical--I was offered a job last spring as the night desk clerk of a super-sketchy motor lodge out by Ocean Beach for $10,000 more a year than I make now as a veteran teacher with a Masters degree, seven credentials, and more than a dozen years experience. I am tired of always having a second and third job, of not being able to go anywhere on the Spring Break I worked so hard to earn, of budgeting constantly and never being able to, as Kelly so wisely said so long ago when we were all living at The House of Flowers, buy avocados. Is it too much to ask Uncle Sam to free me from the tens of thousands of dollars in loans that I spent learning how to do my job well, especially when it is a job no on else seems to want?

Forgive me for complaining. It looks like the only thing I qualify to be forgiven for at this point, so I am going to take full advantage.