Lyndsay Camaroto (right) and Ariel Burkhart discuss the Pennsylvania Department of Drug and Alcohol Programs’ Substance Use Disorder student loan repayment program, which repaid $100,000 and $32,000 of their student loan debts, respectively.
Mirror photo by Rachel Foor
DUNCANSVILLE — When Lyndsay Camaroto, a detox manager at Pyramid Healthcare, learned that her $100,000 in student loans had been paid off through the state’s Department of Drug and Alcohol Programs’ Substance Use Disorder Loan Repayment Program, she cried and “nearly fainted.”
Camaroto is one of about 25 Pyramid employees and 274 total SUD practitioners across the state who were awarded nearly $19 million in DDAP grants to repay their student loans under the first phase of the program, said DDAP Secretary Latika Davis-Jones.
“Because of workforce shortages, we have this opportunity to retain individuals in the SUD workforce,” Davis-Jones said. “It’s more than recruitment. It’s really about retaining those that are already in the field. If they are awarded a student loan repayment, they will give a commitment to your organizations to stay with them for at least two years.”
Eligible practitioners could have “up to $100,000 for full-time employees and $50,000 for those that were half-time,” according to the online application.
High rates of turnover combined with a shortage of health care professionals have “placed increased pressure on employee recruitment and retention” and with this program, DDAP is giving “an incentive to retain SUD practitioners willing to continue” in the field, according to a release.
“If you think about the counseling staff and know the work in that field, they’re working with a pretty complex client base,” Davis-Jones said. “We want to retain them and we don’t want them to feel burned out or over burdened by the work because we know that there’s competition in the market right now. So we don’t want to lose our substance use disorder workforce to, let’s say, the mental health workforce.”
Now that her debt has been wiped out, Camaroto said she is going to focus on making sure her daughter, a sophomore in high school, is set up for higher education.
“She’s very dead set on being in the FBI, so we have lots to prepare for, education-wise,” Camaroto said.
Camaroto is also working on her own professional development, adding that she’s working toward a clinical license in social work — on top of already being a licensed master social worker and a certified clinical trauma professional.
Matthew Dillon, a lead counselor at Pyramid, had $67,000 in student loan debt repaid.
“I was paying $1,000 a month for a year, so obviously that can be a mortgage right there,” Dillon said.
With the debt gone, Dillon has been saving that money and is getting ready to put a down payment on a house, he said, something he otherwise wouldn’t have been able to do.
After receiving her degree in September 2020, Ariel Burkhart, a case coordination manager at Pyramid, said that she was worried about affording student loan payments “with a growing family and the uncertainties of the pandemic.”
“I just applied,” Burkhart said. “I didn’t know if it was something that I would be eligible for, but I prayed that I was and I was very pleasantly surprised.”
Burkhart had her $32,000 in student loans repaid and was able to buy a foreclosed home in the area.
“We’ve been working on that and not having $30,000 worth of debt hanging over us is really a huge help in being able to purchase the things we need to renovate our home,” Burkhart said.
When asked why they would willingly take on such large amounts of debt without the expectation of it being repaid for them, the three agreed that they “want to help people,” in the words of Dillon.
“That’s why I chose addiction and I found that I actually really, really enjoy working with addicts,” Dillon said.
“Addiction has personally impacted different aspects of my family in my life growing up,” Camaroto said. “So I felt like, naturally, this was where I was supposed to be.”
Burkhart echoed these sentiments, adding that she knew since she was 10 that she wanted to “go into some sort of human services.”
“This is just the path that I took,” Burkhart said.
The repayment program was partially funded through medical marijuana revenue, Davis-Jones said.
“We’ve had some marijuana funding to fund this initiative and we have a few other funding opportunities that we’ve had available to us to fund this initiative,” Davis-Jones said. “And for this particular round, we did not use opioid settlement funds.”
According to a release, DDAP is offering another round of its SUD student loan repayment grant program, with more than
$22 million available to assist practitioners within the SUD treatment, prevention, case management and recovery support services workforce. For more information, go to https://prdddap.pwpca.pa.gov.
Mirror Staff Writer Rachel Foor is at 814-946-7458.
