A PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN SEES AN OLD MISTAKE STALL HER NEW START

A young woman named Victoria sits on the porch steps of her aunt's house in
Sacramento's Tahoe Park neighborhood, sipping iced tea. She doesn't want
her last name used. Her situation, she says, is too embarrassing. She
worked too hard to change her life.

At this time last year, Victoria was a community college student in the Bay
Area pursuing a business degree.

Her dream was to someday open a string of designer boutiques. She stands up
to model some jeans she's crafted, the intricate patterns taken from parts
of three other pairs of jeans and embellished with lace, zippers and other
trimmings. "After some pretty rocky teenage years growing up in a really
rough neighborhood, I was getting my act together," she said of college. "I
was in school getting mostly A's and B's. For the first time in my life, my
teachers liked me. I was pretty proud of myself." But a wild streak in her
late teens resurfaced in a way that Victoria, 21, never expected.

The federal government made a connection between Victoria's federal
financial aid and an arrest for marijuana possession when she was 19 years
old, just out of high school and hanging with friends with few aspirations.
Back then, she never realized she might be college material. A friend's mom
got her to enroll in community college and helped her apply for financial
aid since Victoria's mother, with four younger children, worked only part
time. Once Victoria got on campus, she found it was very different from
high school.

The teachers seemed accustomed to students like her, people who never quite
connected in high school.

She also got a small on-campus job, which helped with expenses and cemented
her ties to the campus even more. "It was different.

There was all kinds of help if you couldn't do the work. Everyone seemed
dedicated to getting you back on track in ways that weren't embarrassing,"
she said. But 14 months after she started, the federal government tracked
her down. A 1998 amendment to the rules surrounding federal financial aid
makes students convicted of any drug crime ineligible. Those already on
federal financial aid lose it. On the surface the amendment makes sense.

Lawmakers were trying to discourage student drug use by targeting those
students over whom they might have any control: those attending school on
the taxpayers' tab. (The change in the law wasn't widely publicized,
though, so few students knew of it, virtually negating the deterrent factor
lawmakers were going for.) And, even as the amendment's author, U.S. Rep.
Mark Souder, R-Ind., has consistently said, the law never was meant to hurt
students getting their life back on track.

It wasn't meant to dredge up past mistakes and hold those against students
now. In fact, only those on federal aid who violate drug laws while in
college are supposed to lose it. That's not the way it works, though.

All this is under debate in Congress right now. "I felt really bad because
that wasn't me anymore," Victoria said. "I was hanging with the wrong
people when I was into all that. It was youthful stupidity. I've totally
changed." She's not alone.

More than 140,000 students on or applying for financial aid since the law
went into effect have been denied help because of prior drug convictions.
Interestingly, no such rules exist for students on aid convicted of more
serious crimes.

You'd likely get kicked out of many universities for an armed robbery
conviction, but, if you didn't, you wouldn't lose your financial aid.
Victoria says that, unlike many students hurt by this rule, she's lucky.
For months she never told anyone except for her mother why she'd left
school - "I was too embarrassed" - but her mother finally persuaded her to
confide in an uncle who could afford to help her through community college.

She plans a return in the fall. Transferring to a four-year is another
story; the uncle, she said, can't afford that. "I hope the rules change by
then," Victoria said. "I truly do."