Students, families can now make FAFSA corrections
Delays, processing errors complicate the rollout of this year’s college financial aid process.
Families and students should now be able to make corrections to the Free Application For Student Aid, better known as the FAFSA, after a botched rollout that has caused families and universities to scramble as the deadline to commit to colleges and get financial aid packages looms.
“Beginning late last week, students, on a limited basis, were allowed to make changes to the FAFSA,” said Kim Jenerette, executive director of financial aid, Cedarville University.
“However, colleges and universities are still not allowed to make changes, nor have we been notified by the Department of Education as to when we will be allowed to make necessary changes.”
Kim Everhart, director of the Office of Financial Aid at Wright State University, said WSU has received about 30 corrections so far. The school plans to communicate further with students about corrections, Everhart said.
The U.S. Department of Education, which administers the FAFSA, said more information will be sent to those who are in an “action required” status.
The timing is critical. Under the traditional college admissions calendar, many universities notify students whether they got in and what their financial aid package will be around April 1, and students make their final decision and submit a deposit by May 1. But some families are still waiting on financial aid information from schools or still have to fix errors on their FAFSAS. Many can’t commit to a college without knowing for sure how much they’ll have to pay freshman year.
The new FAFSA was meant to be simpler and it asks fewer questions. But the form wasn’t available until January; it is normally
Kerem Shalom crossing over several months. Palestinian medics would occasionally rush freed prisoners who were injured or ill directly to area hospitals, the report said, adding that they sometimes bore “signs of trauma and ill-treatment.”
Many of the detainees are taken to military holding facilities inside Israel, from which many of them are then funneled into Israel’s civilian prisons. At least 1,500 detainees had been released by the Israeli authorities at Kerem Shalom as of April 4, the report said.
The detainees’ treatment in prison included “being subjected to beatings while made to lie on a thin mattress on top of rubble for hours without food, water or access to a toilet, with their legs and hands bound with plastic ties,” the UNRWA report said.
In the report, one freed prisoner described how an Israeli officer threatened to kill her whole family in an airstrike if she did not provide the Israelis with more information. Another said he had been forced to sit on an electrical probe that burned his anus.
Some freed Gazans told aid workers that they had been beaten on their genitals, aggressively searched and sexually groped, the UNRWA report said. Women said they had been forced to strip in front of male officers, the report said, suggesting that some of the incidents “may amount to sexual violence and harassment.”
When presented with the findings in a draft of the UNRWA report that was leaked last month, the Israeli military said that all mistreatment of detainees was “absolutely prohibited,” adding that all “concrete complaints regarding inappropriate behavior are
forwarded to the relevant authorities for review.” It said medical care was readily available for all detainees and that mistreatment of detainees “violates I.D.F. values.”
The Israeli military said last month that it was aware of the deaths of 27 Palestinians in its custody, at least some of whom were already wounded. And at least 10 Palestinians, mostly from the West Bank, have died in Israel’s civilian prison system since Oct. 7, according to the official Palestinian prisoners’ commission and Israeli rights groups, including Physicians for Human Rights-israel, whose doctors attended some of the autopsies.
UNRWA, a key provider of humanitarian assistance in Gaza, has come under scrutiny in recent months after Israel accused it of harboring numerous Hamas members in its ranks. Major foreign donors, including the United States, subsequently
suspended their funding for the agency, although some have since resumed it.
Israel has said that at least 30 of the group’s 13,000 staffers in Gaza participated in the Hamas-led assault on Israel on Oct. 7 or its aftermath.
In response to the accusations, UNRWA fired staff members who were accused of being Hamas members. Two investigations have been opened into the allegations — one by the UN’’S internal investigations body and another by independent reviewers appointed by the UN secretary general.
In the report, UNRWA said some of its own staff members had been beaten, threatened, stripped, humiliated and abused while being detained by the Israeli authorities. It said that during interrogations, they were pressured to say that UNRWA had affiliations with Hamas and that its staff members took part in the Oct. 7 attack.