the high school teacher in Columbia, Tenn., walked to the mailbox, pregnant with her first child, and opened an official-looking letter from the Education Department.

"I remember going out to the mailbox — I even opened it up at the mailbox — and sheer panic just set in," McCollum says.

Her federal TEACH Grants had been turned into more than $20,000 in loans. The reason: McCollum had narrowly missed a deadline for mailing in some annual paperwork.

She walked inside, sat at the family table beside her husband, A.J., and sobbed.

Not only was this sudden, crushing debt unfair, McCollum later argued to the Education Department, she couldn't afford to pay it on her meager teacher's salary. And she didn't understand why the department wouldn't turn the loans back into grants sinceshe could prove she was teaching, just as she'd promised. She appealed but was told her loans could not possibly be turned back into grants.

McCollum was not alone. NPR's reporting over the past year found that the same thing was happening to thousands of other public school teachers.

The problem at the heart of the TEACH Grant story is that small paperwork issues often triggered this catastrophic consequence. In order to qualify for a grant, aspiring teachers agreed to teach for four years in a low-income public school. But the rules also required that teachers send in a form every year to prove they were actually teaching.

The forms were often due over the summer when teachers and principals, who had to sign them, were away on vacation. And if