Cleveland Heights church focus is on student debt relief as repair
Congregation’s Racial Repair and Restoration Task Force addresses historic harms with new program
As the U.S. government works through plans to overhaul the federal student loan system, one congregation outside Cleveland is considering how student debt is a symptom and amplifier of racist systems and policies in the history and infrastructure of the United States. Through an intentional process of study and reparative action, the congregation of Forest Hill Church in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, decided to take action in the spirit of repair.
On May 15, the Presbyterian church honored the first recipient of its student debt relief program. The program was the outcome of a focused six-month study by the congregation on historic, institutionalized and intersectional racism and its effects on the people in its surrounding community. While the church could have taken many constructive actions, the group tasked with its response decided to focus on the outsized burden of higher education debt that women of color incur and must pay down amid salary and career opportunities limited by racism and sexism. According to a 2023 Pew Research Center study, Black and Hispanic women continue to fall the farthest behind white men in terms of the gender pay gap. Motherhood also has adverse effects on women’s overall earning potential.
The church’s Racial Repair and Restoration Task Force decided to focus on educational debt relief rather than affordable housing due to the lack of programs for student debt. Since that initial decision, the concerns over the size of student debt and the lack of debt relief options for students have multiplied with the way the Trump administration approaches student loans like stricter repayment policies and the uncertain future of public service loan forgiveness programs. Black women in particularly are disproportionately impacted by student loan policies, the end of pandemic protections on loan repayment and cessation of loan forgiveness policies by the Trump administration.
Local channel News 5 Cleveland covered the initial announcement of the church's program back in September 2024. Members of the church’s Racial Repair and Restoration Task Force called it the “Educational Equity Program.” The Rev. Jermaine Ross-Allam, director of the Center for the Repair of Historic Harms of the Interim United Agency within the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), was present on Sept. 24 for an event held at the church celebrating its commitment to repair and restorative actions. Ross-Allam told News 5 Cleveland, “We still listen for what communities are calling for so that they can heal and move forward in the way that they prefer to move forward from the experience of harms of which Presbyterian people have been a part.”
Forest Hill Church joins other PC(USA) congregations assessing their privilege and wealth accumulated through historically unjust systems, then taking the initiative to respond to harm in the larger society as a corrective activity and as a public witness, hoping that their witness will galvanize a movement calling for reparations on a national and global scale.
On May 15, the congregation honored their first student debt relief recipient, Natasha Lovelace. Lovelace is a U.S. Army veteran and a single mother of three; her first child was born when Lovelace was just 16 years old. Her education was interrupted by her family responsibilities and service to her country, but she obtained her college degree in 2018 from Cleveland State University and began paying off her educational debt, which is currently $66,000. The church plans to pay off half the debt this year and the other half next year as it continues to raise funds for its student debt relief program. The church plans to raise another $17,000 by the end of 2026 to fulfill its commitment to Lovelace and hopes to increase contributions to its "racial repair college debt elimination program" by much more in order to be able to open it up to more recipients.
The church is clear that its program is not a scholarship but the paying off of a debt. The literal balance sheet may represent Lovelace’s student loans, but the real debts are those incurred by the congregation’s complicity in the racist history of the land, the community and the nation in which it seeks to bring the gospel. “We don’t use the words: ‘grant’, ‘scholarship’ or ‘award,’” said Task Force member Quintin Smith. “Those words suggest we are giving out of abundance. This is an obligation of the church for its complicity with systemic racism.”
When News 5 Cleveland returned to Forest Hill Church to cover the May 15 celebration, Smith told the reporter, “I think there's a recognition that the human rights, civil rights struggle has now moved to addressing economic disparity.”
“It’s no longer about desegregating bathrooms and lunchrooms. Rather, it's about appreciating that those struggles were successful,” said Smith, “but it never addressed the economic disparity among the oppressed, the marginalized and particularly Black people.”
Learn more about the rising cost of higher education through this report “More than Knowledge and Training: Cost and Value in Higher Education in the United States.” In 2024, the 226th General Assembly approved overture CF-16, directing various offices and partners within the PC(USA) to raise awareness of this report and the cost of higher education as a justice issue.
Learn more about the Center for the Repair of Historic Harms and the movement to address and repair historic harms.
The Office of Financial Aid for Service assists employees of PC(USA) churches and PC(USA)-related entities plan for their higher educational debt needs and public service loan forgiveness. To learn more about the program and register for monthly webinars go here.
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