(Radio Iowa) – University of Northern Iowa president Mark Nook says he supports a bill that makes some changes to a program that provides grants to students who will teach in high need areas. You are required to teach four years at the school or the entire grant converts to a loan. One change would pro-rate the grants.
“So that a student who graduates and teaches in a high needs field for two or three years would be essentially working off that grant a year at a time,” Nook says. “So if they work one year, then one fourth of the obligation is removed, and if they work two years, half of it.” Nook says this would help students that are forced to change their positions.
“Some of our students run into issues that are related to health concerns that they have moving through changes in the district where they’re the position they were hired into met the obligations of the grant, but they move are moved to a position that doesn’t,” he says. He says the changes to the program would also address universities that have a lot of the grants converted to loans.
“So if an institution has a large percentage of their students who are converting these into loans instead of grants, then we want to hold them accountable because there may well be institutions out there who are using these as a way to entice students to take them out, knowing that they may not ever complete them,” Nook says. Nook says it would also provide additional support for grant recipients and helping students successfully meet their service commitments.
Nook says since the inception of the TEACH Grant Program in 2008, some 37-hundred U-N-I students have benefited from the funding. Iowa Congresswoman Ashley Hinson is a co-sponsor of the bill.
