“‘It was so stressful and so frustrating to try to fit our family into those forms when so clearly it wasn’t going to fit,’ said the student, who is now a senior at a university in Illinois and wanted to remain anonymous to keep her family’s financial affairs private.”
This article is mainly about the hurdles that students with same-sex parents face while filling out FAFSA forms, as well as how gay students struggle to be recognized as independents to fill out the forms.
However, I am much more interested in the idea that the bureaucracy involved has yet to create a separate form or in some way acknowledge these issues. The only suggested FAFSA had for the students was to fill out the form as if their parents were divorced.
That is sick. Is a student has a healthy family why should they need to pretend that it’s not? This technique promotes stereotypes against same-sex parents who manage to have a family. I do not understand how an organization could be that insensitive to the struggle that these families go through just to survive in a world that is still adjusting to same-sex marriage.
I would have expected another form to exist or an add-on or something in these situations.
The world is changing, how long will it take bureaucracy to do the same? At the same time, what does lack of these changes mean?
Is it just that no one has gotten around to facing the issue or is that a backlash somewhere up in the hierarchy of all those horrendous forms?
-Rosie Limburg
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