(Excerpts from The Chronicle of Higher Education)

• A bill introduced in Congress on Wednesday would grant students who experience sexual violence federal loan deferments while they are on temporary leave from college for treatment.
• Most federal student loans come with a six-month grace period that kicks in after graduation or when students take a semester off. But under the current system, even if students need more time to recover from an incident of violence, they must start repaying their loans when those six months expire.
• According to Rep. Madeleine Dean, a Pennsylvania Democrat who introduced the bill, easing the combined burden of mental and physical healing from sexual violence and paying off student loans is “the humane thing to do.”
• The Association of Title IX Administrators, known as Atixa, worked with Dean to draft the bill. The organization, which provides consulting services on the federal gender-equity law, began advocating for loan deferments based on sexual violence after hearing from its members that student survivors on leave to recover did not qualify for deferrals — an “oversight” that should have been corrected “a long time ago,” said the group’s president, Brett A. Sokolow.
• Currently, students can qualify for federal loan deferment because of a variety of circumstances, including cancer treatment and economic hardship. Qualifications for federal loan deferment must be defined by Congress.
• Dean’s bill would also grant the Department of Education the authority to waive the amount of federal financial aid students must return when they temporarily withdraw — another protection that would ease the financial burden on survivors.
• In order to qualify for the deferment, students would report the sexual violence they had experienced — including sexual assault, dating violence, domestic violence, and stalking — to the Title IX coordinator at their college. The coordinator would then certify that the student could request a loan deferral for sexual-violence recovery, and the Department of Education would review the request. Students would not be required to file a formal complaint or go through a Title IX investigation to receive a loan deferral.
• Dean hopes the bill will face minimal opposition in Congress, despite the intense partisan gridlockin Congress right now, because it calls for “simple deferral,” not widespread loan forgiveness.