Students face long waits for financial assistance

SARA MINOGUE

When Tina Rose applied for funding in July from Financial Assistance for Nunavut Students (FANS) for the summer semester at University of Saskatchewan, she expected to receive the money well before the end of the term.

Instead, she waited until the first week of September to get approved.

“I’ll get my money in about a week, hopefully,” Rose said. “That’s two months after I applied and two weeks after I finished my summer semester.”

Without a summer job and supportive family, Rose, 22, who is in her third year at the university, would have had nothing to live on this summer.

FANS, operated by the Government of Nunavut’s department of education, will give out $5.6 million in student financial assistance this year.

Yet many students will face delays in getting the funding they’re counting on.

At orientation week at Nunavut Arctic College this August, a career development officer from the department of education came to speak to the new students about finances, applying for funding and employment insurance. She also added FANS to her list of discussion topics.

“There’s a lot of negative feelings about FANS,” she said. “I know that.”

To help students determine their application status, she rolled out a giant spreadsheet she had printed in order to look up the information herself and pass it on to students. She also promised to come back to the college the next day in case more students wanted to find out whether they would receive funding.

The FANS office, based in the education department’s adult learning and post-secondary services division in Arviat, has just five staff dealing with 507 applications — one manager, one loan officer, one financial analyst and two FANS officers.

As of Monday, they had enrolled 346 students, and there will be more. In the 2004-2005 school year, 734 students were enrolled by the end of the year. The previous year, 840 got funding.

The main reason for delays, said Irene Tanayuk, acting director from Aug. 2 to Oct. 28, is “incomplete applications,” including missing social insurance numbers, acceptance letters or banking information.

But students might not always find out that all they need to do is get a document into the office.

“I’ve had problems just about every time I’ve applied,” Rose said in an interview days before heading back south for the fall semester.

But even that was difficult.

“They told us we had to go to the airline counter at the airport to get the ticket,” Rose said. “So we went down to the airport and they didn’t even know what we were talking about.”

Rose soon discovered that all she had to do was call the airline’s toll-free number for assistance, but FANS didn’t know that.

FANS provides basic funding that covers tuition, cost of airfare to and from school, including a Christmas vacation, and is available to all Nunavut residents enrolling full-time in a program that is at least 12 weeks long as a designated post-secondary institution. Non-beneficiaries are eligible for one year of grants for each three years spent as a student in Nunavut.

Beneficiaries are also eligible for a supplementary grant of up to $200 for books and a monthly living allowance ranging from $825 per month for a single student to $2280 for a married student with an unemployed spouse and five children.

Non-beneficiaries can apply for an extra $3,200 loan (or $4,000 with a child, plus $500 for each additional child), which is forgiven if the student returns to work in Nunavut for a period of time.

There is also a new directive from FANS this year.

If you have applied to FANS and are looking for help from Income Support before your FANS funding arrived, you must get approval from the FANS office in advance. Students can only receive this assistance once while waiting for FANS funding.