Our objective was to evaluate the Department’s plans and processes to ensure Teacher Education Assistance for College and Higher Education (TEACH) grantees receive full-time credit toward their service obligations for part-time and temporarily interrupted service due to the pandemic.
Among our findings, we identified weaknesses in FSA’s plans and processes, in its communications with recipients, and with the identification and reprocessing of recipients eligible for pandemic aid flexibilities. This may have resulted in inappropriate denials of flexibilities to some eligible recipients, placed the responsibility on denied recipients to initiate decision appeals, and may have provided flexibilities to recipients who may not have been entitled to those benefits.
We made three recommendations, including that FSA ensure potentially impacted recipients are notified that they may be eligible for a full year of qualifying teaching service if, during the 2019–2020 or 2020–2021 school years, their service was interrupted by the pandemic, including sending communications to potentially impacted recipients and posting more detailed information on customer-facing web pages.
Implementing Pandemic Relief
See more information about our related work on our Pandemic Relief page.