Tuesday, Aug. 19, 2003 | 10:56 a.m.
It's 4 p.m., halfway through the "power hour" of after-school homework help at the Lied Boys and Girls Club.
The learning zone teems with elementary- and middle-school kids, but there's no shouting or horsing around. Most of the children in the room are here by choice, and they're all happily immersed in books or small-group study sessions.
Bernice Marshall surveys the scene with pride from her desk at the front of the room. A teacher in the public school system for 25 years, Marshall said she jumped at the chance to spend this summer at the Lied club on a grant from AmeriCorps, a program that provides members with hands-on leadership and service training.
"All my colleagues say, 'Why do you want to deal with kids? You should be resting during the summer,' " she said. "But I love it. It keeps me going."
But a frown creases Marshall's face as she considers the impending cuts to the clubs' AmeriCorps funding. Mismanagement at the federal level put the program in a financial hole this year, resulting in fewer spots available for AmeriCorps members at the Boys and Girls Clubs of Las Vegas and other service organizations across the country.
Last year Clark County's 10 Boys and Girls Clubs were bolstered by more than 30 AmeriCorps members, who served as the primary teachers in the learning zones. Last week Las Vegas Boys and Girls Clubs AmeriCorps Supervisor Sue Nault found out the program had been allocated just 10 members for the upcoming year.
Despite the 67 percent reduction, Nault was ecstatic at the news. After the clubs' application for a competitive grant from the national funding pool was denied, Nault had feared that they would not be able to accept any AmeriCorps members.
The Boys and Girls Clubs were overjoyed to receive their funding at the last minute, Nault said, but the excitement was tempered by the fact that it came at the expense of another local organization. Bringing Everyone's Strengths Together, better known as the BEST Coalition, lost the funding for all 20 of its part-time AmeriCorps positions.
AmeriCorps was supposed to grow this year.
President Bush said in his 2002 State of the Union Address that he planned to increase membership in the Clinton-era program by 50 percent in support of his national call to service.
Instead AmeriCorps' ranks have been slashed nationwide as a result of mismanagement by its federal umbrella agency, the Corporation for National and Community Service, and local organizations are feeling the pinch.
Sen. Harry Reid was involved in a last-ditch effort to bail out the program with $100 million in a federal emergency appropriations bill, but the Republican-controlled House of Representatives approved a different version of the bill that didn't include the AmeriCorps funding.
A spokeswoman for Rep. Jim Gibbons, who voted for the House bill that cut the AmeriCorps money, said the congressman is a supporter of AmeriCorps, but "didn't feel it qualified as emergency funding."
Olga Mendoza, whose job as AmeriCorps director for the BEST Coalition was eliminated as a result of the cuts, disagrees.
"I think that nationally, and probably on the state level, AmeriCorps is not given the importance that it has," she said. "We often think of AmeriCorps members as 'volunteers who are getting paid,' and it's not the case."
Mendoza said the problem with that common argument against AmeriCorps is that it ignores the difference between a trained service worker and a typical community volunteer.
"My members do amazing jobs, jobs that volunteers would probably not be able to do," she said. "They receive training, they are very dedicated, and they have a whole year to complete tasks in.
"There's no way that our AmeriCorps members could afford to take a whole year of their life and volunteer, as much as they would want to," she said. "Traditionally AmeriCorps members are people with lower economic resources, because they're trying to get money for school and they're trying to get money to live on."
BEST's AmeriCorps members were spread out over several affiliated agencies, many of which involve substance abuse prevention. Mendoza said none of the agencies will be entirely wiped out, "but they will have to curtail their programming," since most of them can't afford to hire paid staff.
Mendoza doesn't begrudge the money that went to the Boys and Girls Clubs of Las Vegas, since that AmeriCorps program was more established than hers. And she said the loss of her own job didn't come as too much of a shock, since she had been following the funding process all summer.
The real losers, she said, are the communities that benefited from the programs.
"I had an AmeriCorps member out at some public housing in North Las Vegas, helping kids with basic life skills and drug abuse prevention," she said. "The parents are just devastated by him leaving, because the kids had a safe haven where they could go after school."
Shawn Lecker-Pomaville, executive director of the Nevada branch of the Corporation for National and Community Service, said Nevada actually fared well this year compared with the many states that had their funding cut by 50 percent or more.
The University of Nevada, Reno's Great Basin Institute and Clark County's U.S. Veterans Initiative both received funding through the national competitive grant process, which doesn't count against the state's allotment of formula grants.
The Boys and Girls Clubs had received its funding through the competitive process last year, but found out this summer that the renewal application was denied. Lecker-Pomaville said she wasn't told exactly why, but it may have had to do with AmeriCorps' new emphasis on homeland security and faith-based programs.
"I think that the homeland security and the faith-based initiatives are particularly close to (the Bush administration's) heart," she said. "But if we're going to bring in new types of programs for emphasis, we need to bring in the corresponding funds."
Lecker-Pomaville said Nevada's AmeriCorps programs were a few hours away from being shut out of the funding process entirely. It wasn't until the last day of this summer's second special session that the state Legislature passed a bill funding the Nevada branch of the national AmeriCorps agency.
"They came through for us on July 21," just hours before the budget passed, she said. "Otherwise none of these programs would be here."
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