Sherry Sancibrian - Advocating a loan repayment bill

ASHA's had a public policy agenda that includes loan forgiveness, both through the state and through the federal agenda's, but I think more is going on with the state. We were pretty excited in 2013—we actually got a loan repayment bill passed. The downside is, we got it approved but not appropriated. So now we'll have the next part to do which is to look for funding. I think one of the hardest things to learn is that with legislation you may not get what you want the first time, so you just have to keep chipping away at it. In 2009, we had really the very same bill, but this time it had seven million dollars attached to it. Unfortunately, even though the legislature approved it, the governor vetoed it. So we had to, sort of, pick ourselves up and try again. And so in 2013, we presented that same bill again. This time we feel like we were pretty successful because at least it was approved—even though the money isn't there. But there were still challenges trying to help our members understand really what the bill was about because, of course, some of them were hoping we could go back and repay loans from five or ten years ago, which we couldn't really do. Trying to help the public understand and the legislators understand why speech-language pathology services and audiology services are so important. That it's actually worth putting tax dollars toward those services. And so, I think those are two of the biggest things that you'll face is you have to make sure that people understand why what we do is important and why it's worth spending the money. Even though we weren't able to get the state funding, we do think it's so important that our state association is going to put the first money into the pot so that we can start this program and maybe prove its worth. The first thing you have to do if you'd like to pursue loan forgiveness is to collect the data. We'd like to think just because we're good people who do good work that everyone's going to try to support us. But really you need your numbers. We joined with the Texas Council of Administrators of Special Education to help us gather good information from special ed directors across the state. So we felt like we had pretty solid numbers about the number of positions that had gone open for a year or sometimes more. And of course, we have a lot of universities in Texas with communication sciences and disorders programs. But it was pretty easy to find out from them how many PhD programs they'd had open too. So before we asked for anyone to even consider carrying this bill, we had the numbers and we were able to tell them what a difference loan repayment could make to help us to fill some of those spots. Another thing I think you really need to do is to involve the students. They're powerful. Legislators listen to them. Those are the people that this loan repayment's going to affect. Our students are articulate, they are able to convey the passion they have for the field and legislators will listen to them. So make sure you involve those people. And then I think you have to use your resources. ASHA has a lot of great sources of help. You can read Leader articles that tell you about some things that you've done in Texas and things that Mississippi did as well. And I know how many times we call the state advocacy department and talk to somebody either for some model language, or some advice about how we might phrase a certain thing that we'd like to discuss with a legislator. I think that they have paper resources and people resources that you have to be sure to use because this is a bigger issue than just a state issue. So if you get your ducks lined up, use your ASHA resources and involve the students, I think you've got a pretty good chance of getting the ear of some legislator who might actually carry the bill for you.