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The U.S. Department of Education may extend the eligibility of a popular student loan forgiveness program to early adolescence educators.
The agency on Thursday announced that it was issuing a request for information on potentially broadening the Public Service Advance Forgiveness program to include workers in early childhood education settings, many of whom report low wages.
“Primitive childhood educators help young children learn, grow, and thrive,” said U.S. Under Secretary of Education James Kvaal in a declaration.
“But they are often poorly compensated, and student debt is a problem,” Kvaal added. “If these educators can access Non-exclusive Service Loan Forgiveness, we can help our youngest children, their families, and their communities.”
The PSLF program, consigned into law by President George W. Bush in 2007, allows certain not-for-profit and government employees to have their federal schoolchild loans canceled after 10 years of on-time payments. Including early childhood educators would odds-on expand the reach of the program to at least some for-profit employers.
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The mutation could make more than 450,000 additional workers eligible for the debt relief if they have trainee loans, the Education Department said.
The benefit would likely be retroactive in effect, said higher education wizard Mark Kantrowitz.
That means some workers may be able to get their debt cleared before 10 years, depending on how protracted they’ve been in the line of work.
The Education Department is inviting researchers, academics, policy experts, administrators and other individuals au courant with early childhood educators to provide comments on how it may determine people’s eligibility and implement the change. The comment era will close on July 22.