At Biden's State of the Union, Boston teacher joins Pressley to highlight debt forgiveness

A veteran Boston Public Schools teacher will attend President Biden’s third State of the Union in Washington Thursday as the special guest of Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley.

Priscilla Valentine, who teaches English as a second language at the George Conley Elementary School in Roslindale, hopes to give a human face to the life-changing consequences of forgiving insurmountable student debt.

While the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Biden's most ambitious effort to forgive student loans last June, the administration still made an unprecedented dent in the trillion-dollar problem, largely by tweaking existing relief programs and introducing others.

But Pressley said she hopes lawmakers will do more. Debt cancellation has become one of her signature issues — a matter she sees as a systemic injustice, she told WBUR.

“Two-thirds of this $1.7 trillion crisis are on the shoulders of women, and it’s [also] a racial-justice issue, because Black and brown students borrow and default at higher rates," Pressley said.

Alongside Pressley, several other Democrats, including Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, have lobbied the Biden administration to keep canceling debt. Working people especially, Pressley said, need to be freed from what can become a never-ending financial trap.

Pressley connected with Valentine through the Boston Teachers Union, and invited her to the address.

Lawmakers often bring guests to the State of the Union to illustrate or promote current policies. (Other guests expected to attend this year include Elizabeth Carr, a Massachusetts resident and the first person to be born via in vitro fertilization in the U.S. Meanwhile, Warren will bring a retired Boston Public Schools teacher whose student debt was also canceled.)

It was student loans that put that dream within reach: she got her bachelor’s degree from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 2000; then, her master’s from Wheelock College in 2003, before its 2018 merger with Boston University.

She came to teach at Boston Public Schools as a single mother struggling to pay down the debt.

“Those loans have been like a black cloud hanging over me my entire career,” she said in an interview with WBUR. “I’ve been everywhere: from forbearance to default, repayment plans, in and out, over the years.”

As of 2023, Valentine owed over $117,000 — far more, she said, than she’d originally borrowed. Meanwhile, her credit score sank, locking her in financial instability.

“Whether it was a mortgage, a credit card, a vehicle: either I didn’t qualify, or I did and the [interest] rate was very high,” she said.

Pressley can empathize. After briefly attending Boston University — and herself defaulting on a loan — she carried “a lot of shame,” she said.

By sharing these stories, Pressley said she hopes to both “tell the story about how impactful the relief that has happened has been — and also to … make the case for why we need broad-based cancellation.”

After the high court blocked the Biden administration's most ambitious, $400 billion plan last summer, officials pursued other avenues to debt relief, including the income-driven repayment plan known as SAVE, as well as expanding eligibility for the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, which forgives student loan debt for public workers after about 10 years of repayment.

Valentine was one of the many locked out of that latter program while its definition of “qualifying payments” was notably narrow. She became one of thousands to benefit after Biden loosened eligibility requirements in 2022.

Late last April, Valentine received a letter from the federal government saying all of her $117,000 in debt had been forgiven. In tears, Valentine described it as “one of the most emotional moments of my life.”

Pressley noted the expanded Public Service Loan Forgiveness program on its own has forgiven over $1 billion in total debt for qualifying workers in Massachusetts.

Valentine is grateful for that relief, saying she is back on a path to financial stability. But, like Pressley, she believes the government can keep canceling debts. She hopes, in some small way, that her presence during Thursday’s speech might help.

“When [the president] is at the table to fight for student loan forgiveness, I want him to have, essentially, my story in the back of his mind,” Valentine said. “Because there’s so many more people like me, right?”