ANNAPOLIS, MD — Nearing the one year mark of frozen funds, parents are frustrated.
"Extremely stressful, the sleepless nights trying to figure out how I can work it so he doesn't have to take out student loans earlier than I originally thought," said Monica Heinlein, the mother of two college students.
Accounts were frozen when Maryland 529 discovered a calculation error was inflating the amount of money given out in interest payments.
Parents told us the statements they got last year showed large amounts of money in them, some had more than $90,000.
They say school decisions were made based on those accounts, now some people only have their initial investment from 20 years ago.
Parents feel money was taken from them.
"We want to make sure we get what we're promised in our contract which is we get our payments we made to MPCT and we get 100% of our investment earnings back and we can use it for any qualifying expense, roll it over to the investment plan. That's all we want," said Kirk Litton who has 3 529 accounts.
Today, legislators in a Senate committee heard testimony from parents on a bill that would create a workgroup to address the issue.
It would also examine the fund to stop issues like this from happening down the road.
Parents like kirk litton feels they'll be made whole.
"We're going to win, we're going to win because it's clear in the binding contract. A second grader could read it and realize we're owed what we're asking for," said Litton.
While parents are continuing the fight and the spring semester goes on, the next round of tuition payments are looming.
"We've got like six months until the next bills are due and the next round of freshman are going to be entering college, those families are going to need their money so it's just going to keep growing, the need for help," said Heinlein.
As for if the solution is coming fast enough,
"it's not fast enough," said Litton.
There is talk that the treasurers office could take over the issue.
He mentioned at his election and swearing in ceremony yesterday he would work hard to get the job done if he was given the task.
Maryland 529 released an update on Jan. 24 saying it hasn't frozen tuition and fee benefits.
Adding, there was an issue with the calculation of earnings from the over performance of the trust that the board wanted to give back to account holders.
They're confident the calculation issue has been resolved and they started providing manually calculated reports to those account holders.
