DaVasha Lobbins works as a secretary at Waverly Schools in Lansing, but she aspires to be a teacher. The 27-year-old was empowered by a high school class that taught personal finance and other life skills, so she earned a bachelor’s degree at Western Michigan University with a double major in Family and Consumer Sciences and Fashion Design in 2015. While a self-supporting undergraduate student in 2013, she helped to lead an afterschool program for underprivileged high school students from Kalamazoo to learn how to sew. The students learned to make clothes and held a fashion show fundraiser, and two of the students went on to study fashion design in college. “That was my confirmation that teaching is what I needed to be doing,” she said. But Lobbins already holds too much student debt; she can’t afford to pay for certification out of pocket and take a year off from work for student teaching. “We shouldn’t have to scrape pennies to work in a field that is absolutely necessary for our society to function. We shouldn’t be required to not only work unpaid, but also be required to pay to work, while student teaching.”