The first thing Marcus Dillard did when I walked into the coffee shop on Ponce de Leon Avenue was apologize for being five minutes late. He’d just come from parent-teacher conferences, still wearing his lanyard, a stack of ungraded quizzes tucked under one arm. It was a Tuesday in late February, and he looked like a man running on not quite enough sleep and not quite enough paycheck.
Marcus is 34 years old, a high school math teacher in Atlanta’s public school system, and for the past three years he’s been quietly falling behind. Not dramatically — no missed rent, no collection calls — but the slow, grinding kind of behind that shows up in avoided bank statements and credit card minimums paid just barely on time.
The Debt That Followed a Good Decision
Marcus did everything he was told to do. He went to college, got decent grades, and then pursued a master’s degree in education because he believed — reasonably — that an advanced degree would mean better pay. In Georgia’s public school system, a master’s degree does bump your salary on the pay scale. What nobody spelled out clearly was the math on the other side of that equation.
When I asked Marcus to walk me through his loan situation, he pulled out his phone and read me the number from his loan servicer app with the practiced flatness of someone who has long since stopped being shocked by it. “Sixty-two thousand, four hundred dollars,” he said. “Give or take. I don’t look at it too often because it doesn’t change much.”
His loans are a mix of federal Direct Unsubsidized and Graduate PLUS loans taken out between 2014 and 2016. His original repayment plan put him on a standard 10-year schedule, which translated to roughly $640 a month — a payment he managed when his wife, Denise, was working full-time as a dental hygienist. Then their second child arrived in 2022, and daycare costs for two kids in Atlanta ran them close to $2,400 a month.
Denise cut her hours. The math stopped working.
What His School District Never Told Him
Marcus had heard the phrase “Public Service Loan Forgiveness” before — he thought it was something for lawyers and nonprofit workers, not teachers. He’d never sat down with anyone to find out whether he qualified. When I mentioned that public school teachers with federal loans who make 120 qualifying payments over 10 years can have their remaining balance forgiven under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, he stared at me for a moment.
“Nobody at my school ever mentioned that,” he said. “Not HR, not a counselor, nobody. I’ve been teaching at a Title I school for six years.”
That detail matters. The Teacher Loan Forgiveness program — a separate, faster-track option — provides up to $17,500 in federal loan forgiveness to teachers who complete five consecutive years at a low-income school, according to Federal Student Aid. Marcus’s school qualifies. He was already more than a year past the five-year mark when we spoke.
Beyond loan forgiveness, Marcus also had no idea that income-driven repayment plans could dramatically reduce his monthly obligation in the short term. His servicer had never proactively reached out to suggest he explore other options. “I just assumed the bill was the bill,” he told me. Under income-driven repayment options available for federal borrowers, payments are calculated as a percentage of discretionary income — for many borrowers, that’s significantly lower than the standard repayment amount.
The Childcare Tax Credit He Left on the Table
The loan situation was only half the story. When Marcus mentioned that Denise had cut her hours, I asked whether they’d claimed the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit on their federal return. He wasn’t sure. After checking with his tax preparer later that week, he confirmed they had — but only partially, and not at the rate they likely qualified for.
The Child and Dependent Care Credit allows families to claim a percentage of qualifying childcare expenses paid so that a parent can work or look for work, according to the IRS. For two or more qualifying children, up to $6,000 in expenses can be claimed. The credit rate ranges from 20% to 35% depending on adjusted gross income.
Marcus and Denise had been paying close to $28,000 per year in daycare and after-school care combined. The credit they’d left partially unclaimed represented a meaningful difference in their annual return — not a windfall, but real money for a family managing on one full income and one reduced one.
“I think we just filed the way we always filed,” Marcus said, with a tired laugh. “Same preparer, same questions, same paperwork. At some point you stop asking if there’s something better.”
The Turning Point: A Single Conversation With a Housing Counselor
The moment things began to shift wasn’t dramatic. Marcus’s school had brought in a financial wellness counselor through a partnership with a local nonprofit — the kind of one-time lunch-and-learn that most teachers ignore. Marcus almost skipped it. He went because his planning period happened to be free.
What the counselor told him in forty-five minutes was more than Marcus had learned about federal relief programs in his entire adult life. She walked him through the basic structure of PSLF, explained that his six years of payments at a qualifying employer likely already counted toward his 120-payment threshold, and pointed him toward the PSLF employer certification form.
Marcus submitted the PSLF employer certification form the following week. He also filed a Teacher Loan Forgiveness application for the years he’d already completed. The process wasn’t instant — federal loan forgiveness applications can take several months to process — but by the time I followed up with him in March 2026, he had confirmation that his application was under review.
The Outcome — and the Regret That Came With It
Marcus’s story doesn’t have a clean Hollywood ending. His Teacher Loan Forgiveness application is still pending as of this writing, and the broader landscape around federal student loan programs has been unsettled by ongoing legal and policy changes that have left borrowers across the country uncertain about timelines and outcomes.
What has changed is his monthly cash flow. After switching to an income-driven repayment plan, his monthly loan payment dropped from $640 to approximately $290 — a reduction of $350 per month based on his household’s current income. That’s not nothing when you’re paying $2,400 in childcare.
The anger is legitimate. A 2023 report by the National Education Association estimated that a significant portion of educators who qualify for PSLF have never submitted the required employment certification — often simply because they were never informed by their employer or loan servicer. Marcus was one of them for six years.
He told me he and Denise have started having real conversations about money — something he said never happened in the house he grew up in. “We sat down last month and actually looked at everything,” he said. “Every account, every bill. It was awful. It was also the first time in years I felt like we had some control.”
When I left the coffee shop that evening, Marcus was already on his phone, scrolling through the StudentAid.gov portal to check on his certification status. The quizzes were still ungraded. Some things, at least, stay constant.
His situation is not unique. Across the country, public servants — teachers, social workers, government employees — are sitting on relief they qualified for years ago and simply never claimed. The programs exist. The eligibility criteria exist. What often doesn’t exist is anyone willing to explain them clearly, without jargon, to people who are already exhausted from doing everything else right.
Marcus Dillard did everything right. He just had to wait six years for someone to tell him what that was worth.
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