Dear CFT members,

As too many of you know, there are major problems with the way federal student loans and loan forgiveness programs are administered for CFT members. AFT recently filed a major lawsuit against Betsy DeVos for the US Department of Education’s failures to correctly implement public service loan forgiveness.

Late last week, via one of AFT’s partnerships with other advocacy organizations who work on student debt, we learned that the State of California did not timely certify its list of Title I schools to the US Department of Education for 2018-2019.

This means that any of you who are K-12 teachers attempting to attain the Teacher Loan Forgiveness you are entitled to on the basis of your work in Title I schools may have encountered an obstacle getting this year correctly credited towards that forgiveness. It is a major error, symptomatic of the failed handoff between different parts of the US Department of Education.

Fortunately, we believe that this list will be corrected retroactively. After I inquired with the California Department of Education, staff there assured me that they would fix it by submitting the list immediately.

If you have submitted an application for Teacher Loan Forgiveness and received a response suggesting that your school did not qualify for this past year when you believe that it should have, you should re-submit that application as soon as the list of California Title I schools is updated on the US Department of Education website. That website is here: https://studentloans.gov/myDirectLoan/tcliDirectorySearch.action. As I write this, there are no California schools listed for 2018-2019; when the list is properly updated, it should look very similar to the one you get when you search the same site for California schools in 2017-2018.

While the above program is only for teachers, all public employees including classified and higher education faculty can obtain loan forgiveness by pursuing Public Service Loan Forgiveness; PSLF is a different, more generous program and this informational snafu won’t have any impact on the implementation of PSLF.  You may also want to consider pursuing Public Service Loan Forgiveness, rather than Teacher Loan Forgiveness; PSLF is a different, more generous program and this informational snafu won’t have any impact on the implementation of PSLF. If you’re weighing your options, you may want to review this comparison of the two programs from AFT’s Higher Education division: https://www.aft.org/sites/default/files/loanforgiveness-pslf-compare.pdf

In Unity,
Jeffery M. Freitas
CFT President

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