A retired Boston Public Schools teacher will accompany Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren to this year’s State of the Union address at the Capitol Thursday.
Warren told GBH News that Benadette Manning, a 30-year veteran of BPS, is a beneficiary of President Joe Biden’s recent student loan debt cancelation for hundreds of thousands of public service workers.
When Manning, a mother of four, went into public school teaching, she had $30,000 worth of student loan debt. Despite working full-time for decades — mostly at Fenway High School — she fell behind on payments and was forced to take on side jobs.
Still, late penalties and interest continued to accrue and Manning had thousands of dollars left in payments. She applied for debt relief — twice — under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program, which makes public service workers with student loan debt eligible for forgiveness after making 120 qualifying monthly payments.
Manning was denied both times.
According to Warren, the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program, enacted in 2007, has seen little success.
“It was a way of saying ‘thank you’ for getting an education, and then using that education in the public interest,” she said. “But here’s the deal: The program just didn’t work.”
Just 200 people in Massachusetts actually got their loans canceled under the program before Biden took office, Warren said. But since 2021, when his administration made changes to the program, that number has increased to 17,000 — one of whom is Manning.
Since the Supreme Court struck down a sweeping student loan forgiveness plan last June that could have affected up to 43 million borrowers, the Biden administration has moved forward with more targeted programs that have still eradicated tens of billions of dollars in debt.
“Getting my student loans canceled by President Biden was a tremendous weight off my shoulders, allowing me to pay off my car loans and finally retire,” Manning said in a press release.
With changes to the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program, nearly 800,000 public service workers have had their loans forgiven — and counting.
“Here’s the best part: Every month that goes by, more people are eligible and more people are seeing their debt canceled,” Warren told GBH News. “That’s making government work for the people who work for us.”
Warren acknowledged that there have been setbacks to student loan relief efforts thanks to a conservative majority in the House and on the Supreme Court. But she maintained that Biden is committed to fixing already-existing programs that provide relief, like the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program.
“It turns out [that] if you start rummaging around in the drawers, there are all kinds of student loan debt programs,” Warren said. “So the president said, ‘Pull them out, sharpen them up, use them, tell people about that.’ And so far, he has already canceled student loan debt for nearly four million people nationwide.”
