By COLLIN BINKLEY (AP Education Writer)

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. Education Department said it has discovered a calculation error in hundreds of thousands of student financial aid applications sent to colleges this month and will need to reprocess them — a blunder that follows a series of others and threatens further delays to this year’s college applications.

A vendor working for the federal government incorrectly calculated a financial aid formula for more than 200,000 students, the department said Friday. The information was sent to colleges to help them prepare financial aid packages but now needs to be recalculated — even as the department works through a backlog of more than 4 million other financial aid applications.

A statement from the Education Department says the problem won’t affect 1.3 million applications that were processed correctly and distributed to colleges this month. Officials said they have fixed the error and it “will not affect future records.”

Students applying for college have been left in limbo this year as they await the Education Department’s overhaul of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. The form, known as FAFSA, is used to determine eligibility for federal Pell Grants, and colleges and states use it to award their own financial aid to students.

The update was meant to simplify the form but took months longer than expected. It gives colleges less time to make financial aid offers to students, and it gives students less time to decide where to enroll.

“This is another unforced error that will likely cause more processing delays for students,” said Justin Draeger, president and CEO of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators.

After so many delays, he added, “every error adds up and will be felt acutely by every student who is counting on need-based financial aid to make their postsecondary dreams a reality.”

The latest misstep has to do with the Student Aid Index, a new formula used to determine students’ level of financial need after they submit the FAFSA application. For some students, the department forgot to factor in certain financial assets including investments, savings and total cash, according to an agency memo sent to colleges on Friday.

It resulted in a lower Student Aid Index for those students — indicating they have more financial need than they do in reality.

While the department fixes those students’ records, it’s encouraging colleges to make their own calculations and craft “a tentative aid package.”

Draeger pushed against that idea, saying colleges can only work with “valid and correct data.”

“It is not feasible or realistic to send out incorrect FAFSA data and ask thousands of schools to make real-time calculations and adjustments to the federal formula,” he said.

Advocates fear that the chaos of this year’s process could deter students from going to college at all, especially those for whom finances are a key part of the decision.

Senate Republicans are requesting a hearing with Education Secretary Miguel Cardona to discuss their “serious concerns” about the FAFSA rollout.

The notoriously time-consuming FAFSA form was targeted for an overhaul in 2020 through bipartisan legislation in Congress. The bill promised to simplify the form, going from 100 questions to fewer than 40, and it also changed the underlying formula for student aid, promising to expand it to more low-income students.

But the update has been marred by delays and technical glitches.

The form is typically available to fill out in October, but the Education Department didn’t have it ready until late December. Even then, the agency wasn’t ready to begin processing the forms and sending them to states and colleges, which only started this month.

Along the way, the department has scrambled to fix numerous bugs. Early on, the process failed to account for inflation properly. Another glitch blocked parents from filling out the form if they did not have a Social Security number. That meant many students who are U.S. citizens or permanent residents but whose parents are not could not apply.

The department says those problems have been fixed, and it’s now rushing to process millions of student applications and send them to colleges and states. The agency says it has processed 1.5 million applications out of about 6 million received so far.

The department “will continue delivering large volumes” of records in the coming weeks, its statement said. “We remain focused on helping students and families through this process and supporting colleges produce aid offers as quickly as possible.”

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The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

The city of St. Paul hopes to install a Mississippi River Learning Center in Hidden Falls/Crosby Farm Regional Park, and it’s looking for a multi-disciplinary team of design and engineering experts to take existing concept plans and turn them into design and construction documents. Proposals are due to the city by May 15.

The River Learning Center is envisioned as a gateway to the river, with environmental and cultural learning components linking visitors to the 600-acre park. The city is working with the Great River Passage Conservancy, the Mississippi Park Connection and the National Park Service to build on the schematic design, programming and engagement work completed to date.

The concept of a River Learning Center was first laid out in the 2013 Great River Passage master plan, which called for reorienting the city to the river. A technical study was done in 2017 and a feasibility analysis in 2018. After a yearlong process of public engagement, a design team completed a conceptual or schematic design in 2022.

Funding for the next phase was awarded by the state Legislature last year.

For more information, visit GreatRiverPassage.org.

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BROWNS VALLEY — An early analysis of a recent fish kill on Lake Traverse indicates that the mild winter weather likely set the stage for it.

An affliction known as “gas supersaturation trauma” is the preliminary diagnosis for the fish kill reported March 14, according to Ortonville Area Fisheries Supervisor Chris Domeier with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources .

He estimates that there were 2,000 to 3,000 dead freshwater drum or sheepshead, and several hundred each of dead crappies, bluegills, catfish and white bass when he boated the affected area of the lake. He estimates there were also around 100 each of dead walleye and smallmouth bass.

Domeier and fisheries staff conducted a field investigation, collected water data, photographed and sampled fish.

Dr. Isaiah Tolo of the Minnesota DNR fish health laboratory analyzed the data. He concluded that gas supersaturation trauma, also known as gas bubble disease, is likely the cause of the kill.

It results when there is a supersaturation of oxygen and other gases in the lake.

“Under these conditions the dissolved gases in the blood and tissues of exposed fish can come out of solution and form gas emboli (gas bubbles) leading to various health issues, such as heart or kidney failure, and can ultimately kill a large number of fish,” Domeier wrote in a synopsis of the finding.

He added that fish have been submitted to the laboratory for a confirmation of the diagnosis.

The mild winter, sunny days and thin, clear ice provided good conditions for algae to grow in the lake. The heavy algae growth can lead to the higher-than-normal levels of oxygen and other gases in the lake, Domeier explained.

While the fish kill will affect the number of freshwater drum, bluegills and crappies available to anglers, Domeier believes that overall the lake should still provide decent fishing opportunities this coming season.

The shallow lake covers 10,848 acres in Traverse County on the Minnesota border with South Dakota.

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Whenever I see a historical novel that’s clearly a historical novel — the curlicue cover fonts, windswept beaches, hooped dresses, moody Renaissance hues, tall-masted schooners, maybe a helicopter to suggest Vietnam — I cringe. I feel bad for the writer. Because the idiot part of myself whispers that historical fiction was a terrible mistake. It’s one of those residual, myopic cultural prejudices, the kind that equates the value of a piece of music with its complexity and tells us not to take comic books seriously. I forget momentarily that genre has nothing to do with quality, and that, in the past decade alone, more than a few National Book Award winners (“Blackouts,” “The Good Lord Bird”) and a large majority of Pulitzer winners for fiction (“Trust,” “All the Light We Cannot See,” “The Night Watchman,” “The Nickel Boys”) were historical fiction.

I forget that a good historical novel often brushes past the biggest hurdles and defies our doubts. It must face readers who inevitably question its historical accuracy, while simultaneously understanding: Focus too much on the facts, and the imagination suffers.

This is why I feared the worst for Cristina Henríquez and her fourth book, a historical novel titled “The Great Divide,” just released. Her work, so far, written from suburban Hinsdale, has been some of the warmest, welcoming contemporary fiction on the subject of international borders and families. But the key there is contemporary. Each new book from Henríquez, all acclaimed — “The Book of Unknown Americans,” “The World in Half,” “Come Together, Fall Apart” (a 2006 story collection) — took on cultural legacy and family history yet found its heart not in the monumental but the everyday.

“The Great Divide” is set a century ago during the digging of the Panama Canal, and not on the fringes, but among men constructing it, international emigrants hoping to find work in a prosperous Panama, locals protesting Americans, and Americans both eager to help and make a buck. It’s a brisk 319-page epic about love and violence that, seamlessly, holds history in balance. It’s also one of the buzziest new books of spring. I met with Henríquez recently to discuss the risks and rewards of stepping into historical fiction. This discussion has been edited for clarity and length.

Q: Your father is from Panama. Considering how much you have to take on to write historical fiction, does having family from there factor into your approach?

A: Well, it’s a love letter to Panama, in a way, and family. I grew up in Delaware, but we spent summers on vacations there. Not as tourists, but visiting family, getting grandma’s medication from the pharmacy, hanging laundry! I didn’t speak Spanish then and I would feel like an outsider. I think I became a writer trying to piece together into a story what I was hearing. We would go to the canal and sit in the blazing sun and watch ships pass through. My family wasn’t involved in the construction era, 1904 to 1914, but I spoke to my dad a lot while writing, and once, after three years of work, he said, ‘You know, I worked on the canal, after high school, in the dredging and engineering division.’ He’s an engineer. I’m like, ‘OK, that might have been helpful to know three years ago.’

Q: You didn’t think you were writing historical fiction.

A: Not until fairly far into the process, when I realized it was going to get described. It was just a novel set in the past. I was never muted by that and I never felt hung by that.

Q: Do you read a lot of historical fiction?

A: What I have noticed is how many books I have been reading that get categorized as historical fiction, that while I am reading them, well, I didn’t think of them that way, not until later. A lot of big writers work in this (area) now. Jesmyn Ward’s last novel, “Let Us Descend.” Paul Harding’s “This Other Eden.” Daniel Mason (“North Woods”) is on my list to read. Edward P. Jones’ “The Known World” (set on a Virginia slave plantation) was a constant companion while I wrote this. “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” too, by Gabriel García Márquez, though it’s ostensibly historical. And “Slaughterhouse-Five,” which, again, is ostensibly about the firebombing of Dresden, moving in time, breaking rules.

Author Cristina Henriquez on March 1, 2024.(Antonio Perez/ Chicago Tribune)

Q: The problem is when you see the research, I think. I was reading a historical novel recently that would just stop short at times to dump in a lot of background.

A: You start to think of all the interesting things you discovered during research, but how to get them in seamlessly? What do you let go? If it can’t be grafted to a character’s perspective, let it go. I made a note while I was writing: You Are Not a Tour Guide! I don’t have to explain everything I learned about Panama. It’s all in service to the story.

Q: But you did research.

A: An enormous amount. The first six months, before putting pen to paper, all I was reading was about the Panama Canal, and even then it took me five years to finish. And during that time, I’m still only reading about Panama, and pestering the library in Hinsdale for access to journals and articles and maps that I can’t find online. There are Panama Canal scholars, and they would read drafts and give feedback. But then I also went to Panama and found resources there that don’t exist outside of its own libraries.

Q: Did you have to go to Panama?

A: A fiction writer’s job is to imagine something whether they are there or not, but it helped. Could I have done it without my personal connection to the place? Hard to say. People want to know if it is based on family — they always want to know that, no matter what you write. I’m trying to understand why it matters how much is autobiographical. But this was a whole cloth invention of characters and trying to imagine what it was like.

Q: The problem is, the question of accuracy gets all-consuming for audiences.

A: Yes, but with fiction, to a degree, there’s latitude. Edward P. Jones and “The Known World,” he has official men coming to the door to discuss official historical documents. But I remember when asked about it on a TV show, he said he made it all up. I made a lot of this all up. Fiction is my job, but look, you also want to be faithful: I studied train schedules and would think, “Do they leave on the 12:55 or the 1:55? Does it change the timeline of the story?” You do ask these things. On the other hand, if I couldn’t find the name of a street or something, I would make it up. All of which, in a way, proves the premise of the book: Some history hasn’t been told and remains buried, and the fact that you can’t find many of the basic details to explain that, it’s evidence for why you write.

cborrelli@chicagotribune.com