Financial aid will be restored to students in Pima Community College’s aviation program after the school received temporary approval Thursday to resume aid payments.
The U.S Department of Education signed off on allowing the payments so as not to interrupt the education of the students whose financial aid has been frozen since May, a PCC news release said.
The department is still weighing whether to impose a financial penalty against PCC over events that led to the freeze on aid payments.
“We are grateful that the Department of Education understood the very real needs of our students,” Chancellor Lee Lambert said in the news release. “We will continue to work with the (department) to fully resolve the situation.”
News that financial aid was being restored came two days after the college advised aviation students to make other arrangements because PCC didn’t know when aid payments would resume. School officials said Wednesday they were hoping to have a solution by Sept. 28.
Some aviation students, in a bid to work around the aid ban, had agreed to spend more than 50 hours a week in the classroom to restore their eligibility until a final solution came down.
Aviation student Mike Hazen said he's satisfied with the outcome but not with the college's administration.
"I'm happy with the decision, but not happy with how it was handled and the communication between Pima and students throughout this whole ordeal," he said.
Hazen is one of the students who agreed to take classes for more than 50 hours a week. He said he still intends to since he has already purchased a $150 textbook for the extra class.
Students in the prestigious program have been in financial limbo since PCC discovered that school officials years ago failed to seek required accreditor approval for the aviation training site at Tucson International Airport. The discovery made students attending classes there ineligible to receive federal financial aid. The airport site has since received the accreditor’s approval.
It also means that aviation students in years past were ineligible. The education department is calculating how much aid the college wrongly dispensed before the issue was discovered, and that could play a role in the decision to penalize the school. It wasn’t immediately clear when a final decision is expected.
PCC typically enrolls about 150 students a year in its aviation program. It’s not clear how many of them were affected by the aid ban.
College-wide, more than 50 percent of PCC students receive federal grants and 12 percent received federal loans in the 2014-15 school year, according to the education department.
