Senate Moves To Eliminate Drug Question

As leaders in Congress work to revise important higher education legislation, SSDP activists around the country are making sure legislators pay close attention to the law that strips financial aid from college students with drug convictions.

The Senate’s Health, Education, Labor & Pensions (HELP) Committee recently approved a bill that includes language preventing the Department of Education from asking about students’ drug convictions on the FAFSA financial aid application, which may effectively prevent the government from enforcing the aid elimination penalty.

The penalty, added to the Higher Education Act (HEA) during its last reauthorization in 1998, has made 200,000 college students ineligible for federal financial aid simply because they have drug convictions.

Chapters Take Action

To ensure that the penalty is removed from this year’s HEA bill, SSDP activists took part in a “Week of Action to HELP Students” from April 16-20, 2007. Twenty-seven SSDP chapters – in 13 of the 21 states represented by members of the HELP Committee – organized tables on campuses where fellow students could easily make phone calls and send letters to key decision makers on Capitol Hill.

Students at the University of Connecticut, for example, flooded the office of Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) with hundreds of phone calls and e-mails.

Dan Cornelious, president of SSDP at UConn says the experience was one of the most valuable things his chapter has done this year. “Giving students the opportunity to directly get involved in influencing decisions was not only immensely important but also extremely exciting,” he said. “The knowledge that our collective voices have the potential to influence change on Capitol Hill – and that our leaders are actually listening – instills confidence, power, and hope in all of us.”

To make generating constituent communication as easy as possible for chapters, the SSDP national headquarters created eye-catching handouts with step-by-step instructions for making phone calls to legislators’ offices, as well as simple paper petitions that concerned students could sign if they didn’t have time to make a call.

Cornelious said his chapter made good use of these materials. “The petitions and the phone scripts were an indispensable component of the Week of Action. Without them, I believe many students would have been reluctant to make phone calls because they might not know what to say. The petitions were also a great tool to expand our chapter’s mailing list and disseminate info about SSDP in general.”

Legislators are Listening

The language passed by the HELP Committee shows that students’ voices are being heard on Capitol Hill. “Key Senate staffers kept telling me that the constituent calls and e-mails were making a difference,” said Tom Angell, SSDP’s government relations director. “The HELP Committee’s action is a direct result of the efforts of thousands of students across the country. And when the House acts later this year, all signs are pointing to a significant scaling back – if not outright repeal – of the penalty.”

Indeed, SSDP has worked closely with many members of the House of Representatives and is optimistic that the penalty will be fully repealed in that chamber’s HEA reauthorization bill later this summer or fall.

SSDP has been calling for full repeal ever since the penalty was enacted, and was instrumental in its being scaled back by Congress in 2006 when its “reachback effect” was removed. Under the current version, only students who are enrolled in college and receiving aid at the time of their drug law violations are affected.

It is clear that because of SSDP’s large and powerful grassroots network across the country – as well as the relationships SSDP staff are building with decision makers in Congress – students are becoming a force to be reckoned with on Capitol Hill.

Of course, SSDP is not alone in pushing for repeal of the aid elimination penalty. Lobbyists for other prominent organizations that are part of the Coalition for Higher Education Act Reform (CHEAR) (co-founded by DRCNet), including the American Bar Association and the United States Student Association, have been pressing for repeal and have recently accompanied SSDP staffers to meetings on Capitol Hill.

SSDP’s multifaceted advocacy strategy – generating grassroots student action complemented by a powerful coalition of organizations in Washington, D.C. – is having an impact on the way Congress is addressing the aid elimination penalty.

To easily send a message to your legislators about this harmful law, please visit
http://www.ssdp.org/help/

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