Dear Future President,

In two years I will finish high school and move on for college. I will leave behind my younger sister and my disabled father. My father, like many other disabled parents, will loose the money he receives each month for me and will not be able to assist in the tuition for my years in college. Furthermore, the scholarships are limited in number and they do not contain enough money to truly help me and all of the other children in this situation. This is a problem that needs to be addressed as soon as possible so these children have a chance at college without the additional years to pay off all of their college debt.

When the child of a disabled parent turns eighteen the parent looses the money sent to assist them in their support of the child. Currently I am a sixteen year old junior high school student. I only have this year and my senior year left until I finish high school and leave for college. My father will loose some money every month when I turn eighteen, on the other hand, I will soon need money for college. This means I will need to rely on scholarships and student loans to pay for my college and be left in at least a years worth of debt. A way to fix this problem would be to lower the tuition of college at least with kids like me who do not have money to spare on further education. Well it is a good thing we have scholarships at least.

A scholarship is a grant of money given to students for different reasons, which is supposed to help with the issue of how expensive the cost of college is. The scholarship for having at least one disabled parent is $1000 per grant and only a certain amount are given out so it can not help every one. The fact that everyone does not get a scholarship is not the biggest issue, the money per scholarship is. $1000 is not going to do much help for a total of $156,245 for the tuition of a four year college. The answer should be to give children of the disabled more scholarships and more money per those scholarship so they can afford it without the years of debt.

The hardest truth of all of this is when our parent wants to help in anyway they can but then ends up not being able to because they can not afford it. Living with a disabled single parent can make some jealous of others since they do not have the money they do or it can make others more understanding and feel guilty almost for everything that was given to them as an extra "want" and not a "need". I am among the later because I do not want to have my father pay for any of my college tuition since he only gets a set amount each month for all of the bills, food, and other things needed to be bought to support himself and my sister. I would rather him know I am all set so he does not have to worry if I had money for my next meal. I would want my father to be able to save some extra money since I will not be home to add to all of the cost. I suppose all of these different thoughts all just depend on the kind of person we are and how we were raised.

Single disabled parents will be put in a time of struggle when one of their kids goes off to college. The disabled parent will lose money. The child will not have enough money. Scholarships have a set amount and each are only $1000. These are the basic problems of this issue that need some type of solution, so the parents still have money to get by and help their kids some if they want to and have the children have more scholarship opportunities.