THE GRADUATE
Kate finds a way to defuse her share of debt from the nation’s $1 trillion student loan time bomb before it blows
KATE LECKONBY STANDS in a mobile trailer unit attached to Archdale-Trinity Middle School (ATMS) and looks like she’s about to faint. A moment later, she’s crumpled to the ground.
A quick check of her vital stats reveals normal blood pressure and heart rate. She shows no signs of exhaustion from hours of teaching Spanish to sixty students each day in her Archdale, North Carolina, school.
So what gives?
Kate is simply feigning collapse because a teeming trailer-load of seventh graders has butchered the pronunciation of a basic phrase like ¿Cómo te llamas? again.
Until the kids can pronounce “ll” as a y sound, Kate had better get used to staying down. Because a day’s lesson has culminated in “What’s your name?” sounding like a Spanglish-ized inquiry about the South American relative of a camel.
“We joke a lot in my classroom. I let the kids tell me random funny stories where it’s applicable. I fall on the floor pretending to faint when they make errors in Spanish that we have talked about one hundred times,” she tells me. “They laugh. We have a great classroom atmosphere.”
On one wall of her classroom trailer hangs a black sombrero accented with silver trim. Near it yellow cut-out letters reading “¿Por qué aprendemos español?” (Why are we learning Spanish?) spill out like a news crawl above a doorway. Another wall is plastered with colorful student papers artfully arranged around the words “Trabajo excelente” (Excellent work).
Kate’s done some excellent work of her own, chiefly in the way she’s handling the student loan debt she amassed on the way to a master’s degree in education.
“I went to a private school in New York State initially [for my bachelor’s degree], but quickly transferred to a SUNY school [State University of New York] to save money. I was an RA in addition to playing college basketball and working constantly to try to cut housing costs,” Kate says. “I was in that middle where my parents made enough that the government didn’t write a check for my education. But my parents weren’t able to help at that time.”
For her master’s, she went to the University of North Carolina at Greensboro part-time at night during her second and third years of teaching.
“I made so little that I had to take out enough loans to pay for books and my travel to and from [campus],” she says. “It was either that or not do it. . . . I know that it made me a better, more knowledgeable teacher.”
The end result was graduating with $43,000 in federal student loans. Her current salary is $39,000.
Student loans are a backbreaking burden on many people in this country for both young and old. Collectively, borrowing in our country for education is nearing $1 trillion. I believe it’s the next debt bubble to burst.
But Kate is hitting her little chunk of that $1 trillion with a one-two punch.
First, she’s capping the amount she pays every month through an income-based repayment (IBR) plan. So while she was once paying $245 every month toward her education debt, she’s now paying just $45 under the IBR plan.
Second, she’s using the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program, which is open to a broad range of public service employees, not just teachers, to receive full loan forgiveness on any outstanding balance after making ten years of monthly payments on her loans.
By Kate’s accounting, she’ll pay somewhere around $5,000 over the next 120 months and have her loan balance of roughly $38,000 forgiven at that time. Those dollar figures could go up or down a bit over the next ten years based on family size and adjusted gross income, but you get the idea.
Trabajo excelente, indeed.
Kate’s husband, Brian, is also a teacher at ATMS. He teaches history and is head coach of the school’s football team. Together they have a two-year-old daughter, Lauren.
Like many teachers, Kate forms a deep bond with her students. It’s one that’s remembered years later on both sides.
“Just the other day, I went to the drugstore and the cashier was a student that I had four years ago. He is now a senior! His face lit up, as did mine, and he commented how much he always loved my class, that it was his favorite,” Kate says. “Middle school kids don’t often express their appreciation at age fourteen, so it’s always neat to hear it—even if it is four years after the fact.”
Kate says her personality as a teacher is hard to describe, though she’s “very driven and detail-oriented.”
When I spoke to her, she was looking forward to fun learning activities like siesta day, when the class would discuss the custom and its implications on society; and another day when they planned to make churros—a long, thin fried dough pastry sometimes called a Spanish doughnut.
Though both Brian and Kate love what they do, furloughs are a threat to their family budget. In 2009, North Carolina issued a furlough that amounted to a .5 percent cut to their salary.
“I think we got some workdays off in return, but no teacher can afford to take workdays off!” Kate says.
A teacher’s salary tends to be laddered, with very few, if any, raises during the first three years and then bigger jumps in compensation during the fourth, fifth, and six years. But Brian and Kate were frozen just before they began their fourth year.
“[Living on] two North Carolina teacher salaries has been an incredible challenge—especially in trying to do more than just get by every month. Since 2008, we have not received any raises, not even cost of living. Brian and I make the same thing we made five years ago—probably a little less, actually.”
In fact, the couple’s health benefits have gotten worse and they’ve had to go from standard 80/20 coverage to a cheaper 70/30 plan.
“This year, they did give us a 1 percent raise, but then they raised dependent health coverage—which of course they didn’t publicize—so anyone with kids didn’t move forward at all.”
Fortunately, Kate and Brian have been able to manage because, like many teachers, they work second jobs. Kate was a part-time instructor at a community college for a time. And Brian runs wrestling tournaments and is an umpire in the spring.
“We are grateful to have stayed employed during these tough economic times, but we worry about how much longer this will go and how it will affect our family’s future. We love teaching and both got into it for all the right reasons, but unfortunately there is a sentiment that teachers shouldn’t care about money [or] their paychecks. I think it’s irresponsible for us not to.”
Kate is originally from upstate New York and Brian is from the Canton, Ohio, area. She credits both of their parents for making them into people who can raise a family on teaching salaries.
In fact, Kate and Brian decided to go into a longer-term play for their financial future when they bought a condo in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, with Kate’s parents two years ago.
“We researched and shopped for two years, losing lots of properties in the process to people who had cash offers or who were just quicker than us. But we knew this was the time in history to make that investment. We finally fell upon the best deal we had seen in all of our searching.”
Financing their share of the condo has been a big sacrifice that’s required many cuts in other places.
“We don’t own smartphones, we don’t really take vacations, we have worked most summers since we started teaching, [and] we drive two paid-off cars,” Kate says. “But we believe it will pay off, and [be] something we can enjoy with our daughter in the meantime.”
If you’re swimming in student loan debt, take heed of these tips:
See if you qualify for the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program.
Explore other student loan forgiveness and repayment options.
Get student loan forgiveness for homesteading.
Know the rules for student loan borrowing.