BCS teacher Jeff McGrail won the contest of a lifetime earlier this month after learning he was one of three national winners to have his college student loans paid off for him
According to Forbes.com, student loan debt is now the second-highest consumer debt category in the United States behind only mortgage debt. Over 44 million borrowers owe a collective $1.5 trillion in student loan debt across the country, affecting college graduates and students of all ages from California to Maine and anywhere in-between.
Earlier this month, one Berlin Community School fourth-grade teacher won the contest of a lifetime to no longer have to worry about the mountain of student debt that’s been looming over his head for nearly a decade.
Growing up, Jeff McGrail always wanted to be a teacher. Initially, he thought high school would be a good level, but decided after graduation that elementary school would be his strongest grade levels.
McGrail went to college at DeSales University, deciding to go away for school to get the traditional college experience. Being the first in his immediate family to go to college, it was difficult starting out to understand all of the financial jargon and work behind the scenes to make college possible.
“My parents really didn’t have a good understanding of what loans were and student loans and how they worked and all the interest,” McGrail said. “So we just kind of took whatever we could get at that point.”
After college, he was an AmeriCorps teacher with AmeriCorps Notre Dame Mission Volunteers, teaching math in fifth, sixth and eighth grades in Wilmington, Del., for two years, which helped pay off loans with grants through the program. Before starting with AmeriCorps, McGrail recalls having approximately $70,000 in student loans.
Shortly thereafter, McGrail got a job with BCS where has had been ever since, and for as long as he’s taught BCS students, he’s also been paying a hefty amount of money each month into the black hole that is his student loan debt.
As most college graduates can probably attest to, he felt that even with all the time that had passed, he wasn’t getting anywhere.
“Originally when I first started paying off my loans it was around $700 a month. I felt like I was paying them every month and they would never go down because you were just paying the interest,” McGrail said. “It was crazy.”
McGrail worked it down to around $50,000 this January, when his mom saw on Facebook by 6ABC that the show “Grown-ish’ on Freeform partnered with the scholarship site Scholly to pay off graduates’ student debts up to $125,000 each.
McGrail went through several rounds of the contest to become a national winner alongside two others, having him write essays and provide proof of his loans.
McGrail discovered he was a winner when he received an email from Freeform saying they were still a few weeks out from picking a winner, but wanted to do another interview with him to get a feel for his personality, advising him to be “camera ready” and answer the FaceTime call on his phone horizontally.
To his surprise, on the other side of the call was one of the actresses from the show who would soon let him know that he was a winner. Despite two months of build up, McGrail says he never realistically expected to win. During the first round, he urged family and friends to apply for the contest in hopes that someone he knows would at least win.
“Even when I got to the second round, like how many times have I written an essay for something and not won?” McGrail said. “I wasn’t getting my hopes up.”
McGrail says, according to Freeform, he expects the contest to pay off his existing student loan debts within the next few weeks.
“To me, it’s even better than winning the lottery,” McGrail said. “Because this is something that was constantly on my mind. It’s like winning to get a burden taken away from you, which is just awesome.”
Now with the large backpack of student debt off his back, McGrail is looking forward to really getting his life started. Having been engaged since July, he’s getting married this October and wants to start the adoption process quickly after. No longer having to pay his student loan debt, he can contribute more to his savings and looks forward to eventually buying his first home.
Because of his student debt over the past six years, McGrail says he would “break down” every six months because of the worry of not being able to pay his student loans one day or not being able to reach milestones in his life due to the debt.
“I just feel a lot lighter,” McGrail said with a laugh.
