News Alert – For NASW-NYC Members

NYS Social Work Loan Forgiveness Program Moving Toward Reality

Higher Education Services Corp. Expects Applications to be Ready in January, 2006

In a recent meeting attended by NASW representatives in October, key staff of the State’s Higher Education Services Corp. (HESC) discussed their plans for launching the newly created Social Work Loan Forgiveness Program.  HESC is the responsible State Agency for writing regulations for the program and  for administering it.

NASW was responsible for promoting loan forgiveness and lobbying for its passage.

HESC staff shared with NASW that there are several steps that they must legally take before the program can begin.  This includes meeting in November with representatives of several other state agencies to clarify the meaning of of the term “critical shortage areas”.  The loan forgiveness program is intended to help attract social workers to accept employment in shortage areas, but the authorizing legislation does not identify anything beyond service delivery systems, including health, mental health, aging, child welfare, and HIV/AIDS.  In addition, “multi-lingual” communities are also identified as shortage areas.  HESC may need to further define what a critical shortage area is. 

By state law, HESC must also publish draft regulations and allow for a public comment period.  Their staff said that given the work they need to do at this point, applications should be ready soon after January 1, 2006.

Given that this is  going to be a new program, certain details are not yet know.  One thing that was clarified in the meeting is that to qualify for loan forgiveness, a social worker with a LMSW or LCSW will have had to have already worked for the last 12 months in one of the critical shortage areas.  How this is determined will become clearer once the applications are available.  The deadline for applying is likely to be March 1, 2006.

HESC staff said that $6,500 in loans can be forgiven in each year the graduate is employed in a shortage area, up to $26,000 over four years.

Social workers who are interested in getting a sense of what the program may look like can go to the HESC website and look at the loan forgiveness program for nursing faculty, which is described on the HESC website at  http://www.hesc.com/bulletin.nsf/.  You can search at the bottom of the page for “loan forgiveness”, then find the nursing faculty program link.  The application can be reviewed to get an idea of what the social work application may look like.  (Caution: the social work program will differ in many respects from the nurses program, but this is the best example available.)

NASW-NYC will inform its members as soon as more information is available.

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