The first thing Marcus Dillard told me when I walked into the coffee shop near his school in southwest Atlanta was that he hadn’t opened his banking app in eleven days. Not because he was irresponsible, he explained — but because looking at the numbers made his chest tight. “I know what’s in there,” he said, wrapping both hands around his coffee cup. “Knowing and seeing are two different things.”
Marcus is 34 years old, a high school math teacher with nearly a decade in the classroom. He is, by any measure, exactly the kind of person the American education system depends on. He is also, by his own account, quietly drowning.
The Loan That Was Supposed to Be an Investment
Marcus finished his master’s in education in 2018, carrying $62,000 in federal student loan debt. The degree was supposed to unlock higher pay and more stable footing. What it actually unlocked, he told me, was a monthly loan payment that arrived like clockwork while his salary moved in much smaller increments.
Georgia public school teachers earn a base salary that varies by district and experience level, but according to Bureau of Labor Statistics occupational data, the median annual wage for high school teachers nationally was approximately $62,360 as of recent reporting — a figure Marcus said felt “aspirational” given his district’s pay scale at the time he graduated.
What Marcus hadn’t fully reckoned with — and what emerged slowly over our two-hour conversation — was that he had been eligible for the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program since the day he started teaching. Under PSLF, federal employees and qualifying nonprofit workers, including public school teachers, can have their remaining federal student loan balance forgiven after 120 qualifying monthly payments under an income-driven repayment plan.
According to Federal Student Aid, borrowers must work full-time for a qualifying employer and make those 120 payments — roughly 10 years — to be eligible. Marcus had been teaching full-time at a public school for nearly eight years. He had made payments for most of that time. But he had never formally enrolled in PSLF, never submitted an Employment Certification Form, and had no idea how many qualifying payments he might have already accumulated.
When the Second Child Changed the Equation
The financial pressure Marcus described wasn’t just about student loans. In 2023, his wife cut her hours significantly after their second child was born. The cost of full-time childcare for two children in Atlanta runs between $1,800 and $2,400 per month depending on the provider, according to estimates from the Child Care Aware of America — a figure Marcus confirmed was close to what they were facing before his wife stepped back from full-time work.
The math, as Marcus put it with a tired laugh, “stopped adding up.” His take-home pay after taxes and retirement contributions was covering the mortgage and utilities. Childcare, groceries, and minimum credit card payments were consuming whatever remained. The student loan payment — roughly $650 per month on a standard repayment plan — had become the number he dreaded most.
That last detail is what made the conversation shift. Marcus had been making standard repayment payments — not income-driven ones. Which meant that even though he’d been paying for years, those payments may not have been structured to qualify toward the 120-payment PSLF threshold. He stared at the table for a moment when I walked him through that distinction. “So I’ve been doing it wrong the whole time,” he said quietly. It wasn’t a question.
The Programs He Didn’t Know He Could Access
Beyond PSLF, I asked Marcus whether he had looked into any other federal relief options tied to his situation. He hadn’t — not systematically. He knew vaguely that tax credits existed for children but hadn’t dug into the specifics since his second child was born.
For tax year 2025, the Child Tax Credit provides up to $2,000 per qualifying child under age 17, with up to $1,700 of that potentially refundable as the Additional Child Tax Credit, according to IRS guidance. With two children under five, Marcus’s household could potentially claim up to $4,000 in Child Tax Credits — money that could offset what he owed or generate a refund.
There was also the Child and Dependent Care Credit — a separate federal credit that can offset a portion of childcare expenses paid while working. For two qualifying dependents, families can claim up to $6,000 in eligible expenses, with the credit covering between 20% and 35% of those costs depending on adjusted gross income. Marcus hadn’t claimed this credit on his most recent return. He wasn’t sure he’d ever claimed it correctly.
When I laid out what those two credits combined could potentially mean for his household — a refund or tax reduction in the range of several thousand dollars — Marcus exhaled slowly. “I feel like I’ve been running a race and nobody told me there were shortcuts that were legal,” he said.
What the Path Forward Actually Looks Like
I want to be honest about what I told Marcus — and what I didn’t. I’m a journalist, not a financial advisor or a loan counselor. I could walk him through what programs exist and how they generally work. What I couldn’t do, and what I made clear, was tell him exactly what he’d qualify for or how to structure his specific situation.
What I could tell him was that the PSLF Help Tool, available through the Federal Student Aid website, allows borrowers to check employer eligibility and track qualifying payments. I could tell him that switching to an income-driven repayment plan — something he could do through his loan servicer — would be a necessary step before any future payments counted toward PSLF. And I could tell him that the Department of Education had, in recent years, implemented a limited PSLF waiver program that allowed previously non-qualifying payments to be counted retroactively under certain conditions, though the window for that specific waiver has closed.
Marcus listened carefully. He pulled out his phone and typed notes — something he said he almost never does when money comes up. “Usually I just nod and then go home and don’t do anything,” he admitted. “But this feels different. Like there’s actually something to do.”
Leaving the Coffee Shop With More Questions Than Answers
By the time we finished, Marcus had a list of four things to look into and a clearer picture of the gap between what he’d been doing and what was available to him. That’s not a resolution — it’s a beginning. He still has $62,000 in loans. His wife is still working reduced hours. The credit card minimums haven’t gone anywhere.
What had changed, at least in that two-hour window, was the weight of not knowing. Marcus grew up in a household where money was never discussed openly. His parents worked hard and kept the details private, which meant he entered adulthood — and then graduate school, and then parenthood — without a map for any of this. That’s not a character flaw. It’s a gap that millions of American households share, and one that federal programs were theoretically designed to address, even if the navigation is anything but simple.
When I followed up with Marcus three weeks after our conversation, he told me he had finally used the PSLF Help Tool and submitted his Employment Certification Form. He was waiting on confirmation of how many qualifying payments he had on record. He hadn’t yet switched repayment plans, but had a call scheduled with his loan servicer. He had also opened his banking app. “Four times this week,” he said, with something that sounded almost like pride.
That’s not a happy ending. It’s just a next step. But for Marcus Dillard — a man who spent years teaching other people’s children how to work through problems while quietly avoiding his own — it was something.
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