SPOTLIGHT
Desperate Times Call for Desperate Money Junior Law and Justice major Kassandra Bender faced unemployment and being pushed out of campus early in only her first year living on her own. However, Bender has extra financial help from her mom while living away. Bender uses her weekly unemployment money to pay rent -- which she wouldn’t be able to pay without her campus job -- and stock up on food and toiletries for quarantine. “With that money, I was able to pay off a few bills… and I’m able to buy books. I was able to buy a printer that I needed for schoolwork, too,” Bender says. “Because of the CARES Act, it went up $600, before that, I was only getting about $180 [of unemployment benefits], and now I get around $700,” she says. She receives this chunk of money, knowing that if she isn’t going to save it, she will use it to help herself in the meantime. “I am expecting to deal with college debt for a long period of time in my life. Mental states have gone down a bit during quarantine… relieving that pressure of money I owe helps a lot,” she says. With three more entire years of education to go, Bender feels enormous pressure. How the CARES Act Cares for CWU Community CWU’s Financial Aid Director Adrian Naranjo says as a part of the original CARES Act, money was given to schools around the country to be distributed to students who did not receive stimulus checks, and who are still in need of financial support. Nearly $3 million was allocated to CWU from the grant. “We know that a lot of students reached out to ask for financial assistance,” Naranjo says. “My assumption would be that the stimulus they were receiving was doing not enough to help them cover their expenses, and that’s why they had to request additional assistance through the CARES grant.” According to Naranjo, Congress issued money to schools because they realized many students
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would not be receiving checks. “If they hadn’t put money in there, a lot of students would’ve had nowhere to go,” he says. Naranjo says over 2,000 student employees were let go when the pandemic put the campus on lockdown. Some students had trouble finding financial support from their parents, who also lost their jobs. “In general, students can reach out to parents and say, ‘Hey can you help me for a month or something,’” Naranjo says. “But when parents are in the same situation, that’s a tough financial bind to be in.” A Look Into the Future The CARES Act has improved the issue of unemployment due to COVID-19 for not only students, but families, businesses, and companies. The stress that the pandemic has caused the world financially is still lingering as many businesses still face restrictions in different parts of the country. The Act will continue to be beneficial for many more months to come, or at least until things are back to normal. If students come back to campus in the fall, Naranjo says he hopes that some of the money given to CWU from the CARES Act will be able to help fund unemployment again. “Right now, we don’t know what coming back on campus in the fall looks like yet,” Naranjo said in the Spring. “We’re trying to figure out how we can use [CARES Act] funds to get students working again.” The Act expires at the end of July unless Congress comes to an agreement on a new relief package. According to a July article in Forbes magazine online, Senate Democrats want CARES Act benefits to last until the job market recovers, but Republicans are pushing back with the argument that more insurance will discourage people from returning to work. For some Republican legislators, instead of more unemployment benefits, cash bonuses are preferred for those returning to their jobs.