On the recordJanuary 7, 2015
I am delighted to be on the floor today with, among others, Senator Alexander, who has worked so hard on the bill we are talking about today. Through the Chair, I want to wish him well in his new role as chair of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee on which I serve. He is quite right to have said this bill came to us as a result of testimony in front of that committee by a variety of witnesses but all of whom agreed that the current system is completely unwieldy. I would also like to thank the other cosponsors--Senators Burr, Booker, Isakson, and King--for joining the efforts and for being here today as well. I first became aware of this problem when I was superintendent of the Denver public schools. We had a couple who very generously donated $50 million for scholarships for kids who were graduating from the Denver public schools and who had applied to college. One of the things we learned in that process was how terrible the process was for filling out the financial aid forms for the Federal Government. That was a requirement we had for people to be able to be eligible for this scholarship. We literally had to put new rooms in our schools, in our high schools, and staff them with people in order to fill out these forms. Every year tens of thousands of students and parents in Colorado and millions more across the country fill out the FAFSA as part of the college application process. It is the gateway to financial aid.…
