chirping in the back seat. A much-needed spring break vacation lay ahead.

"Do you see that word, 'Congratulations!'?" McCollum said, smiled and laughed. It was official: That debt, now $24,000, had finally been turned back into grants.

"You're free baby," her husband, A.J., said.

"Two years of us fighting this," McCollum said. "We won," she tells NPR. "We raised our voices and they finally heard us. Disbelief followed by a relief like I have not felt before."

The scale of the problem and the fix

The federal TEACH Grant program was created in 2007 with the best of intentions: to help aspiring teachers, who committed to teach high-need subjects in low-income schools, pay for college. And the program succeeded in attracting bright young teachers to work in some of the nation's most underservedschools. According to the most recent data, roughly 21,000 teachers have successfully completed the program's four-year teaching requirement.

But that compares to 94,000 recipients who have had their grants turned into loans. Many of those conversions were justified — young students who later decided teaching was not for them and didn't complete their required service. But many others were undoubtedly like Kaitlyn McCollum: They have taught as promised but were trapped in the program's administrative quicksand.

In December, after multiple NPR reports on the depth of the TEACH Grant problem, the Education Department announced it would offer relief for any teacher who could prove they had fulfilled — or could still fulfill — their teaching service. Grants that had unfairly become loans because of these minor paperwork problems would, at