Students looking at pursuing a teaching career may now be able to afford taking a course at the Northern Marianas College after the U.S. Department of Education recently approved NMC\u2019s participation in the Teacher Education Assistance for College and Higher Education or TEACH Grant Program.<\/p>\n
Open to both U.S. and non-U.S. citizens, the TEACH Grant Program is aimed at providing up to $4,000 per year to students who plan to complete or are completing the required coursework to begin a teaching career without having to demonstrate financial need.<\/p>\n
NMC president Sharon Y. Hart led other college officials in making the announcement at the Board of Regents conference room yesterday.<\/p>\n
Hart said they received the official approval notice via a letter dated April 27 from Erik Fosker, U.S. DOE Team Lead for School Participation Team, NW, San Francisco\/Seattle Team. This makes the CNMI\u2019s community college one of the over 700 colleges and universities throughout the nation that are eligible to receive the grant. <\/p>\n
Hart said this will open the door for more individuals to enroll in a teaching-related degree in the Commonwealth.<\/p>\n
\u201cNormally, any kind of financial aid or scholarship typically must be need-based,\u201d said Hart, explaining that this program would not require income guidelines. \u201cThat\u2019s the beauty of it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hart noted, however, that there are eligibility requirements that students must meet to be considered and eventually qualify for the grant. These include maintaining a cumulative GPA of at least 3.25 or scoring above the 75th percentile on a college admissions test; be enrolled as an undergraduate, postbaccalaureate, or graduate student, in a coursework that allows for the student to begin a teaching career, and the signing of a TEACH Grant Agreement to Serve.<\/p>\n
The agreement stipulates that the grant recipient must serve as a full-time, highly qualified teacher at a designated low-income school for \u201cat least four academic years\u201d within eight years after the coursework is completed.<\/p>\n
The teaching service to be provided should be in \u201chigh-need fields\u201d which are bilingual education and English language acquisition, foreign language, mathematics, reading specialist, science, special education, and other fields deemed by the federal or state government as high-need.<\/p>\n
If the TEACH Grant recipient fails to meet the requirement, the grant will be converted to a loan that must be paid in full at 6.8 percent interest.<\/p>\n
Daisy Manglona-Propst, financial aid director at NMC, said that the recipients will be monitored to ensure that they satisfy the requirements.<\/p>\n
Although it was noted that the program will start in the fall semester, Manglona-Propst has been instructed to check the possibility of having it over the summer period.<\/p>\n
Interested individuals may visit the NMC campus in As Terlaje or call the School of Education 234-5498 Ext. 2232 to 36 or the Financial Aid Office at Ext. 1525 to 27 for more information.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Students looking at pursuing a teaching career may now be able to afford taking a course at the Northern Marianas College after the U.S. Department of Education recently approved NMC\u2019s participation in the Teacher Education Assistance for College and Higher Education or TEACH Grant Program.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-161140","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161140","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=161140"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161140\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=161140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=161140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=161140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}