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The House Education & the Workforce Committee completed consideration of a bill reauthorizing the Higher Education Act (HEA). Included in the 200+ page bill are provisions identifying school-based speech-language pathologists as a profession of national need and priority for loan forgiveness. H.R. 609, The College Access & Opportunity Act, is expected to be considered by the full House of Representatives sometime during the week of July 25th. The Senate is expected to take up this legislation sometime in the fall.
Setting the precedent of recognizing school-based SLPs as a profession of national need under HEA has been one of the top objectives of ASHA's 2005 Public Policy Agenda. ASHA lobbyists will continue to work with House and Senate leaders to promote other measures within HEA to help recruit and retain qualified SLPs and audiologists in schools.
ASHA lobbyists pushed hard for the inclusion of both audiologists and SLPs in H.R.609. However, the committee believes that the U.S. Department of Education has not collected the necessary data to determine if and to what extent persistent shortages of audiologists exists in our nation's schools. Complicating the inclusion of audiologists is determining their status as full-time employees of local school districts (as opposed to contracted private employees) and if the need is comparable to other professions such as nurses, early childhood educators, and school-based SLPs.
The intent of the provision is to attract and retain new professionals in school-based speech-language pathology. If enacted in its current form, the provisions of H.R.609 would forgive up to $5,000 of a student's loan after: 1) obtaining, at a minimum, a master's degree in speech-language pathology from an accredited academic program; 2) meeting the Medicare criteria for a qualified SLP provider (i.e., successfully completed a clinical fellowship and national exam); and 3) having been full-time employed for 5 consecutive school years. Finally, this individual would have to be a "new borrower" after the enactment date of the HEA reauthorization. ASHA lobbyists are seeking clarification that a "new borrower" applies to individuals who are beginning their master's degree studies and not to incoming undergraduates.
The loan forgiveness program would be run through the existing Graduate Assistance in Areas of National Need (GAANN) program at the U.S. Department of Education. To learn more about the GAANN program, the Department of Education maintains a Frequently Asked Questions Web page. For more information or questions, please contact Neil Snyder, ASHA's Director of Federal Advocacy, via email at nsnyder@asha.org or by phone at 800-498-2071, ext. 4257.
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