A look at the the Department of Education's dysfunctional process for evaluating disability—and how it's keeping many genuinely disabled applicants in debt.
After suffering from panic attacks and episodes of psychosis, Donita McDonald was diagnosed with a severe mental illness in 2009. She was unable to work or attend school, so the Social Security Administration declared the 21-year-old disabled.
After six years battling to persuade the Education Department that she was too disabled to work again, the government finally has forgiven the student debt of disabled former police officer Tina Brooks. She was featured in a Feb. 13 story about the government’s broken program for forgiving the federal student loans of borrowers who become seriously disabled.
After an investigation by ProPublica and the Center for Public Integrity last week found that the Department of Education’s bureaucratic program for forgiving the federal student loans of disabled borrowers has kept many disabled applicants in debt, the department said this week that it will overhaul the troubled program.
A pulmonary embolism left Scott Creighton, of Tampa, Fla., unable to continue working full time. His efforts to get his student-loan debt forgiven were turned away by a debt collector acting on behalf of the Education Department, despite a federal law entitling disabled borrowers to that step.
Borrowers who become severely disabled can get federal student loans forgiven, but the program for deciding whether they qualify is a dysfunctional, bureaucratic maze.
