Roxanne Eugene has stayed in Gainesville every Summer since 2013 to complete classes required to apply for physical therapy school.
Eugene, a UF applied physiology and kinesiology junior, said some classes aren’t included in her major’s degree audit and she’ll take biology and its lab component this Summer.
She has taken out loans every Summer, and last year’s added up to $2,500. The 21-year-old said she hasn’t yet been able to pay them off.
Eugene is one of more than 25,000 UF undergraduate students who qualify for Bright Futures, but the scholarship doesn’t cover the Summer terms. However, the Florida Legislature can vote to change that with a $23.5 million proposal in Gov. Rick Scott’s Keep Florida Working Budget.
Students who currently qualify for Bright Futures receive up to five years of partial funding for each undergraduate credit hour taken in the Fall and Spring.
The legislative session started March 3 and ends in May.
Eugene is free of loans in the Fall and Spring with help from Bright Futures.
“If we do receive Bright Futures during the summer, it will help tremendously,” Eugene said.
Rick Wilder, the director of the UF Office for Student Financial Affairs, said it is helpful that most students aren’t required to pay Bright Futures back.
“For those students who are attending Summer, I think it will be a great thing,” Wilder said.
Michelle Nguyen, a UF biology senior, paid for two Summers of classes — one at UF and one at the University of South Florida — without taking out loans.
She paid for her first Summer of classes with the previous school year’s financial aid and the second Summer with a research scholarship. She said it was difficult to divide her finances in the Fall and Spring and plan for Summer.
“As a low-income student, it’s really difficult to balance the two,” Nguyen, 21, said. “Expanding it to Summer would really just make it more convenient to students to learn.”
[A version of this story ran on page 5 on 3/27/2015 under the headline “Bright Futures might cover Summer”]
