Cooperating to Make ALL Arkansans Lives Better
What is the obligation of an elected official in Arkansas?
I believe, once elected, the obligation is to serve all the people within your jurisdiction of service. If you’re an elected state official it is to serve all the state’s people. One of the best ways is cooperating and working with other officials on the state, county, local, and federal levels to make our citizens’ lives better.
Arkansas has just under 400,000 student loan borrowers who owe a total federal student loan debt of $13.4 billion. Report after report show that this student loan burden affects each of these citizen’s lives for years. On average, it takes a citizen 21 years to pay back a student loan.
This affects their ability to own a home. To marry and raise a family. This is particularly true for young people today, who are still financially suffering the effects of a global killer pandemic and the economic chaos resulting from it.
This is why President Joe Biden attempted a first major effort at student loan forgiveness which the conservative U.S. Supreme Court overturned. Now he is continuing the effort in a more balanced way that can meet legal challenges.
I believe the governor of Arkansas and all state officials should cooperate with the White House and federal officials to find out how to relieve this student loan burden from our hundreds of thousands of citizens. Don’t you believe that?
That’s not what we’re seeing from the Arkansas governor’s office. We’re seeing defiance to anything coming from Washington. Negative criticism to any effort at student loan relief. No recognition or gratitude that 10 per cent of our education funding comes from the federal government. That under Biden Arkansas has received at least $1.2 billion to aid our state’s education as it met the scourge of Coronavirus and its effects on schools and students.
Recently, U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona came to Little Rock to openly discuss two main issues: (1) the student loan forgiveness effort to bring relief to thousands of Arkansans; (2) the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) process which has experienced technical problems delaying students’ ability to get funding.
One would expect the governor, or at least the state’s education secretary, to greet Cardona, meet with him, and discuss how the state can cooperate in finding solutions that can help our students.
But neither Sarah Sanders nor her education secretary wanted to get near him. Instead, they sent a jointly signed letter on the governor’s official letterhead filled with seething criticism of both the effort at forgiving Arkansans’ student loans or the federal effort to improve the FAFSA technology. The letter didn’t even welcome him to Arkansas.
What the letter did make clear: Sarah Sanders has no desire to offer Arkansas citizens relief from the slavery of their student loan debts, or to cooperate in helping Washington get Arkansas’s young people financial aid through FAFSA.
“State government needs clarity.”
Perhaps saddest of all was a single sentence through which Sanders basically condemned her own administration: The letter emphasized to Cardona, “State government needs clarity.”
This from a governor’s office that, from the get-go, has worked hard to stifle transparency – to keep Arkansas’s citizens from seeing the governor’s secret efforts to railroad legislation through, including stripping tax money from public schools and primarily give to private schools.
The governor’s negative efforts, as exemplified in this temper-tantrum letter to our nation’s top education official, are harmful to our citizens and to Arkansas’s public image.
How Long Does It Take to Pay O
ff Student Loan Debt? (investopedia.com)