Wisconsin Attorney General Action

This action is for everyone who attended a for-profit school who currently lives in Wisconsin (so even if you used to live somewhere else or the for-profit school was located somewhere else, if you now live in WI this is for you).

As you probably already know, the Department of Education has been letting individual defense to repayment (DTR) applications sit on a shelf and gather dust. Many people have been waiting years for a decision on their individual application. The Department of Education’s strategy here seems to be to wait it out. They want to ignore these DTRs long enough for them to have time to rewrite the rules. Once they have rewritten the rules, they will be able to deny many more people the debt relief they deserve. At the moment we have no mechanism to force the Department of Education to actually process and make a decision on an individual DTR.

BUT, the good news is that there is another option here. The Attorney General can file a group discharge application which would cover all students who attended for-profits like Corinthian, ITT Tech, AI and other schools. Unlike an individual DTR, we do have a way to force them to respond to these group wide DTRs. Two other states have already done this, Massecuttes and Illinois. In a recent court case the judge ruled that the Department of Education cannot ignore these group DTRs in the same way that they are ignoring individual DTRs.

So what we want to do is organize everyone in Wisconsin who has attended one of these schools to email the Attorney General’s office and tell them to file a group wide DTR.

We’ve created a template of for you to follow here:

After you add your story, copy and paste it into the Wisconsin Attorney General’s contact form here: Contact Us | Wisconsin Department of Justice

We have been talking with staffers in the Massecuttets AG office to help learn what is effective. They told us that it only takes a few dozen people to contact them about the same issue for it to get their attention. So let’s make a goal of getting 30 emails from people in Wisconsin to get their attention. After that we can organize a group phone call or even in-person visits to their office to follow up and help them with the process of filing one of these group DTRs.

Please comment below if you get a response and share it with the rest of the group.

If you have any questions please feel free to ask them below. And if you know of anyone else in Wisconsin who attended a for-profit school, like former classmates, friends or relatives, please recruit them to help with this action!

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Thank you for posting this. Trent and I are working on the letter!

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Evening, I have submitted my information to the Attorney General on the predatory actions of ITT Technical Institute. Not sure if this is exactly where it was referenced to post this info, but here is the comment to keep track.

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Awesome! Thank you @williamkloc!! And yes, this is where people should comment to let us know you’ve sent in a letter.

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I’ve just submitted my letter as it relates to my time at Keller Graduate School of Management (part of Devry).

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Awesome!! Thank you @njreid04!!!

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Just sent in my letter to AG Kaul as it relates to my time at ITT Tech.

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Awesome! Thank you @jkernen! Please let us know if/when you get a reply.

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I’ve recently sent letters to the WI AG, Gov. Evers, Tammy Baldwin, CFPB, and DOE, with this same info.

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I have also sent the my letter.

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I submitted our letter to the WI AG tonight.

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Just sent the letter.

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Does anyone need help getting their story put down?

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Hello! I submitted a very similar letter to the Wisconsin AG twice in the last few months, once when Schimel was still in office and one just a couple weeks ago to Josh Kaul.

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I just submitted my letter to the WI AG! There is power in numbers people!

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Can I use the same attorney general form designed for Wisconsin for my attorney general here in Tennessee?

@Thomas_Gokey is the template the same or do we need to create on for Tennessee?

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I’m helping Thomas out with this. The goal for GOP AG states is to make a new template letter leaving out the “19 Attorneys General” fighting against DeVos part, as that does not apply to GOP AGs. I want to hit up all the blue states first though, but people are welcome to edit that part out and gear it more towards the GOP.

AG%20Breakdown

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So right now in WI, Dems are pushing refinance, they recognize there is a big debt problem but the gop is not having it. There is still quite a bit of gop control unfortunately. I haven’t heard back but I’m anxious to try another letter.

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