Higher Education News

You survived the final exams, the all-nighters and maybe even a crazy roommate or two. You did it, class of 2013! Congratulations on graduating!

Before you head off to the real world, it’s important that you take some time to learn about your student loans. Many federal student loans have a grace period, which is a set period of time after you graduate, leave school, or drop below half-time enrollment before you must begin repayment. But that doesn’t mean you should wait to figure it all out. It is important that you use this time wisely. To get you started, here are five things you should know about your student loans:

1. Loan Types

You may have federal loans, private loans, state loans, loans from your school, or some combination of the different types. Different loan types can have very different terms and conditions, so be sure you know what types of loans you’ve got.

To see all of your federal student loan information in one place, you can visit www.nslds.ed.gov. Once you log in, you can access a list of your federal student loans, including the loan type and information for your loan servicer.  A loan servicer is the company that will handle the billing and payments on your federal student loans.

For all other types of loans, consult your records. If you have questions about the type of a loan, you can try contacting the financial aid office at the school you were attending when you took out the loan.

2. Loan Balance

Once you’ve tracked down all of your loans, you’ll want to find out what your total loan balance is. This will help you determine a plan for repayment.

For your federal student loans, www.nslds.ed.gov will display your loan balance. For private and other student loans, you’ll want to check with your lender.

3. Loan Interest

Remember, a student loan is just like any other loan—it’s borrowed money that will have to be repaid with interest. As interest accrues, it may be added to the total balance of your loan if left unpaid. As a recent graduate, you may want to consider making student loan interest payments during your grace period to save money on the total cost of your loan.

4. Repayment Options

Depending on the types of loans you have, you will have different repayment options.

Federal student loans offer great benefits, including flexible repayment options. Some options include tying your monthly payment to your income, extending your payments over a longer period of time, or combining multiple loans into one. Want to compare what your monthly payment would be under each of our repayment plans? Try our new Repayment Estimator! Once you figure out which repayment option is right for you, contact your loan servicer to enroll in that plan.

For nonfederal loans, you’ll want to check with your lender to see what types of repayment options are offered.

5. Repayment Terms and Benefits

Familiarize yourself with the repayment terms of all your loans. Here are some things to keep an eye out for:

• Ways to save on interest, like enrolling in automatic debit
• Options for paying more than your monthly required payment
• Forgiveness, cancellation, and discharge options

With that, Class of 2013: let me be the first to welcome you to the real world, where midday naps are frowned upon and the closest you get to spring break is a Throwback Thursday on Instagram.

But jokes aside, make it a priority to figure out your student loans as soon as you can. The more informed you are the better. So don’t wait—get started today!

Nicole Callahan is a new media analyst at the Department of Education’s office of Federal Student Aid.

Brenda Girton-Mitchell, director of the Center for Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships, announces the new partnership at the NCFL national conference

“Read to your child.”

“Help them with their homework.”

“Make sure they get a good night sleep.”

“And what else?…”

A parent is a child’s first and most important teacher, but our approaches to family engagement often fall short of recognizing the full potential of partnerships between schools and families. The challenges we face in education require that we go beyond these basic messages on family engagement – moving from communication to collaboration among schools and families.

This is why the U.S. Department of Education is working to develop better frameworks for family engagement, and why teacher-family collaboration is a component of RESPECT , our blueprint for elevating and transforming the teaching profession. We are also renewing our Together for Tomorrow initiative with an expanded emphasis on family partnerships to propel school improvement and produce better outcomes for students.

In support of these efforts, we are pleased to announce a new partnership with the National Center for Family Literacy (NCFL) to advance family engagement in education across the country.  NCFL brings to this work more than 20 years of experience providing tools and resources for educators and parents to create lifelong learning opportunities for the entire family.

Through the partnership, the Department and NCFL will jointly develop and implement strategies to raise the awareness and understanding of effective family and community engagement in education.  This will emphasize how teachers and families can better collaborate to improve student engagement and learning. We will work together to:

• Convene community discussions on family engagement with educators, families and community leaders across the country.
• Identify and compile promising practices and program examples for effective family engagement in education, so schools can employ leading practices that work.
• Gather feedback on family engagement frameworks from educators, parents, advocates, and others in the education community.
• Develop and disseminate resource materials to support family and community engagement in education. An example includes NCFL’s Wonderopolis, an online learning community that engages classrooms and families in the wonder of discovery.

We are eager to move this essential work forward, beginning with Together for Tomorrow community conversations in locations across the country.  These will spotlight promising practices and examples of school-family partnerships, and gather feedback to shape the Department’s family engagement efforts.

We also want to hear how your family-school partnerships are boosting student engagement and academic achievement.  Please email us your promising practices and program examples to edpartners@ed.gov

Michael Robbins is senior advisor for nonprofit partnerships at the U.S. Department of Education

Michael Yudin, the Acting Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services (OSERS) talks with students in Sanger, Calif.

Earlier this week, Sanger Unified School District (Sanger, Calif.) had the opportunity to host Michael K. Yudin, the Acting Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services (OSERS), and what a great day it was! I met Michael several years ago when I was invited to share the Sanger story while I was in Washington, D.C., to celebrate being recognized as a National Blue Ribbon School. After a two-hour conversation with a large group of Department staff, the conversation continued with Michael and a small group of others for another two hours.

That day’s conversation was centered on our efforts to transition into a Professional Learning Community district and the outcomes of that effort. The staff were very interested in the journey we were on and in particular the outcomes.  Michael, in particular, was truly impressed by the broad-reaching significant improvements and outcomes made by all students, including students with disabilities, in academic achievement, graduation rates, and scores on accountability testing. Michael told me he had to visit Sanger to observe directly a district making dramatic and meaningful improvements in student outcomes.

Sanger Unified is a rural district in the heart of the Central Valley of California that shares the demographics of the region. We are a high poverty, high minority, high English Language Learner, low-parent education district as are most others in our area of California. In 2004, we were one of the first in California to be identified as a Program Improvement (PI) District due to our failure to meet the learning needs of large segments of our student population, and in particular our English Language Learners, children of poverty, and special needs students.

We began the Professional Learning Community (PLC) journey in the fall of 2005 and exited PI as a district in 2006. Our work in collaborative teams focused on answering the four key questions of a PLC. “What do we want our students to learn? How do we know they have learned it? How do we respond when learning has not occurred? And, how do we respond when learning has already occurred?” These questions generated the framework that drove our achievement gains. That work continues and so do the gains in student achievement.

In particular, the work around answering question three of a PLC, “how do we respond when learning did not occur,” prompted Michael Yudin’s recent visit. Answering that question has led to robust systems of support for individual student learning needs being developed at all sites and at all levels in the district.  These systems provide a balanced approach to intervention that supports both the academic (Response to Intervention (RtI)) and behavioral (Positive Behavioral Intervention Systems (PBIS)) needs of our students, and areas of investment by OSERS.   The foundational piece of this work is that both RtI and PBIS are not Special Education initiatives but rather General Education obligations.  Interventions are not what someone else does for those kids, but what we all do together to support the learning of all our kids.

On Tuesday, Michael and I visited three of our elementary sites, Lincoln, Madison and Reagan, and our middle school, Washington Academic Middle School (WAMS). This gave Michael the opportunity to see our student support initiatives in action. At Lincoln, what we saw was a learning environment with high expectations for the children and deep belief in the children and their ability to learn. The program provides direct support to the students and has developed rubrics to monitor student progress.

Madison and Reagan elementary schools allowed us the opportunity to visit classrooms during RtI. We were able to witness the data driven responses to the learning needs in the small group intensive and strategic interventions for some kids and the opportunity for many others to go deeper by providing enrichment in the benchmark classrooms.  All of these supports are fluid in their nature and are driven by constant regular progress monitoring and data based placement decisions.  Data drives the program and that fact was evident throughout.

The Reagan Data Wall was a great example of one staff’s response to monitoring student progress. Each student has a color-coded card that is placed on the wall according to the student’s intervention placement.  The cards are color coded in terms of initial placement, intensive, strategic, or benchmark, and regularly moved on the wall to reflect current placement. The evidence of student movement within the system is clearly displayed visually by the cards that are constantly updated to include current data. Staff pointed out with pride that at one particular grade level the benchmark band had to be extended on the wall because the original band did not have the capacity to include all of the kids who have moved up bands to that level during the year.

At all three sites the PBIS supports were clearly evident, not just in the banners and posters, but in the behavior of the students themselves.  Creating sets of clear expectations around behavior and then providing supports to meet those expectations has a dramatic impact on school climate, quality of the learning environment, and learning outcomes.

At Washington Academic Middle School we again saw a balanced system of supports for the learning needs of every student. The journey at our Middle School to develop and provide the needed learning supports for our students began several years ago in response to a site request that we adopt a district policy that we would not send students on to High School who had a failing grade in core subject areas.

The staff quickly realized that if they were going to reverse the trend of sending to the high school groups of students who had more than 30% failing grades in core academic subjects, they were going to have to do something different to support student learning. The response of that staff to develop those necessary supports and create a place where a student actually has to work harder to fail than to be successful has been incredible. From noontime homework labs, to academic seminar periods, to after school rectification classes and holiday break intersessions, the system of increasingly intense supports to the learning needs of the students has done the job. As they have built the supports on the academic side of the pyramid, they have also built in a system of behavioral supports and the overall impact on student achievement and school climate is why WAMS is today, a National Middle School to Watch!

Has the work we have done in Sanger in the last eight years made a difference? The answer is yes! In the period of time between 2004 and 2012 Sanger has seen dramatic gains in student achievement in all sub groups. In 2004, we ranked in the bottom ten percent in California in terms of student achievement, recently EdTrust West reported that Sanger has the third highest overall achievement gains in California for Districts with high minority, high EL, high poverty student populations.

In 2004 no subgroup exceeded the state average in AYP and today all do. Looking only at our students with disabilities (SWD), in 2004 we had only nine percent proficient of advanced in English Language Arts (ELA) and 13 percent in math.  In 2012, those levels were 43 percent in ELA and 48 percent in math with the State average being 36 percent in ELA and 37 percent in math. Similar gains have been made in our dropout and graduation rates and the latest data shows a district-wide dropout rate of 3.1 percent and a cohort graduation rate of 94.6 percent. Similar results again are shown in our students with disabilities subgroup where our current dropout rate is 3.6 percent (compared to a countywide average of 23.9 percent and statewide of 17.2 percent) and our cohort graduation rate for the SWD students is 76.4 percent (compared to countywide average of 48.8 percent and Statewide of 60.8 percent). Our RtI program has also resulted in a 50 percent decrease of referrals to special education.

Maybe the most moving conversations that took place with Michael were those at lunch in an informal setting with a group of 30 or so parents, students and staff from various locations in the district. Again and again the parents expressed their appreciation for the levels of support that the district provides for their children in meeting their individual learning needs. One mom shared with pride the learning journey of her daughter who has struggled along the way. The daughter has been provided with various interventions and supports and the outcomes of these efforts have been clearly communicated to both the student and parent.

Another parent shared that she has four children, each of them unique in their nature, makeup and needs.  She said that each of her children has been supported by staff according to their individual needs and not once has she heard the question raised, “why aren’t you more like…” comparing one child in the family and their accomplishments with the accomplishments of a sibling. This, she said, is rare and is exactly why we made the choice to bring our children to Sanger; this is a place where every child is supported to be the best that he or she can be.

I couldn’t have said it better myself, “Every Child, Every Day, Whatever It Takes!”

Marcus Johnson is the Superintendent of the Sanger Unified School District in Sanger, CA.

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Left to Right: Merylee’s husband Reymundo Juarez, daughter Lizelena Marie, son Angel Manuel, father Mario Alcala, daughter Alexandra Ines and Merylee Juarez on the day of her GED graduation.

“Termine la escuela. No queremos que sea como nosotros, a trabajar en los campos en el frío y la lluvia.” [Finish school. We don’t want you to be like us and work in the fields in the cold and the rain.] My mom has always encouraged me to get an education and now that I am a mother myself, I truly understand the significance of her words. Even though agricultural work is honorable, migrant life is difficult and as a student, this is especially true. Time becomes a precious commodity when balancing work, school and family responsibilities.

At 10 years of age I started blueberry picking with my family in Michigan for eight months out of the year and then would live in Texas for the rest of the year. Since then I’ve held several migrant jobs including price tagging and shipping field plants. My parents, trying to give us a better tomorrow, would work long hours every day and as one of seven children, I would help to watch my siblings while my parents were gone.

I dropped out of high school in the 10th grade, but watching my mother learn English to apply for a better job while still caring for her family, inspired me to go back to school. I passionately love to help people, just like my mother, but I realized that in order to help others, I had to help myself first. After several hurdles, I enrolled in the U.S. Department of Education’s High School Equivalent Program (HEP).  The HEP assists migrant and seasonal farmworkers and their children to obtain a GED and serves more than 5,000 students every year. It has made a tremendous impact in my life by not only helping me educationally but by also providing job placement assistance.

Merylee’s mother, Maria De La Luz Alcala

The HEP really helped me get on the path to achieving my dreams. I may have a long way to go in becoming an elementary teacher and then ultimately a Migrant Student Counselor, but I want my children to look at me like I have looked at my mother since I was a child – as a role model. Her drive and encouragement has been a huge force in my life. This Mother’s Day, I hope she reads this blog and understands how grateful I am for her never ending support and for providing for her children the best way she knew how.

Gracias mama. I will continue to make you proud and prove that all your hard work was not in vain. ¡Porque cuando se quiere, se puede! [Because when you want it, you can achieve it!]

Merylee Jaurez is now a proud college student at South Texas College and President of the Migrant Parent Advisory Council (PAC) and Secretary of the Title I PAC in Monte Alto, Texas.

Interested in learning more about ED’s migrant programs?

Migrant Education Program (MEP): Ensures that children of migrant workers have access to and benefit from the same free, appropriate public education, including public preschool education, provided to other children. The MEP funds help state and local educational agencies remove barriers to the school enrollment, attendance, and achievement of migrant children.

College Assistance Migrant Program (CAMP): Assist migrant and seasonal farmworkers and their children to successfully complete the first undergraduate year of study in a college or university, and provides follow-up services to help students continue in postseco

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I’m not afraid to admit that being a college senior is a little frightening (okay, slight understatement-it’s extremely frightening!) As the Class of 2013 prepares to say goodbye to the comforts of our college community and say hello to the real world, we are faced with many realities. Where will I live? How am I going to find a job? Will I make ends meet?  Will I be happy?

And with all these new exciting challenges and responsibilities, one of the last things on most of our minds is repaying our student loans. Yet it’s one of our responsibilities and we should be prepared for when the first bill arrives in the mail.

I will be honest in saying that this repayment process is a little intimidating, and before writing this post I was at a loss of where to begin. Luckily, the Department of Education’s Office of Federal Student Aid (FSA) has tools available to walk soon-to-be grads through the loan repayment process:

• Exit Counseling: Recently redesigned to be more interactive, Exit Counseling provides important information to student borrowers who are preparing to begin student loan repayment. Exit counseling is required when you graduate, leave school, or drop below half-time enrollment, so talk to the financial aid office at your school about completing it.
• Federal Loan Repayment Plans: Understanding the details of repayment can save you time and money. Find out when repayment starts, how to make your payment, repayment plan options, what to do if you have trouble making payments, and more!
• Repayment Estimator: Federal Student Aid recently launched a Repayment Estimator that allows you compare your monthly student loan payment under different repayment plans to help you figure out which option is right for you.  Once you log-in, it will automatically pull in all of your federal student loan information so you can compare repayment plans based on your specific situation.

So with all of these great resources, I’ve found that things are clearer, and not quite as scary. Class of 2013 we are about to embark on a new adventure, best of luck to each and every one of you!

For additional information and tips, visit Federal Student Aid on Twitter , Facebook, and YouTube.

Kelsey Donohue is a senior at Marist College (N.Y.), and an intern in ED’s Office of Communications and Outreach

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