McCollum was not alone. NPR’s reporting over the past year found that the same thing was happening to thousands of other public school teachers.
NPR Ed
The problem at the heart of the TEACH Grant story is that small paperwork issues often triggered this catastrophic consequence. In order to qualify for a grant, aspiring teachers agreed to teach for four years in a low-income public school. But the rules also required that teachers send in a form every year to prove they were actually teaching.
The forms were often due over the summer when teachers and principals, who had to sign them, were away on vacation. And if teachers sent in this annual form even one day late, missing a signature or date, or with any other little problem, their TEACH Grants would be turned into loans, with interest. And this process was irreversible. Teachers were told their loans could not be converted back to grants.
For two years, the debt haunted McCollum and her young family.
