Washington

Corporations and nonprofit organizations are rallying around a supplemental $200-million appropriations bill to ensure that AmeriCorps, the national-service program, will have enough money to operate effectively next year. The issue is of particular interest to colleges, officials at the organizations say, because recent college graduates are a cornerstone of the volunteer program.

Representatives of more than 1,100 nonprofit groups that use volunteers from AmeriCorps hastily organized a news conference on Thursday in Washington to highlight what they say will be the devastating impact to thousands of communities nationwide if AmeriCorps eliminates thousands of volunteers and staff members to deal with accounting problems. Also on Thursday, more than 200 corporate leaders signed a full-page ad in The New York Times pledging their support for the program.

The nonprofit organizations have created a Web site to coordinate efforts to preserve AmeriCorps.

Both groups are calling for President Bush to approve the $200-million in emergency funds proposed last week by a bipartisan group of 40 U.S. senators. The senators and the groups feel that that much money is required to keep AmeriCorps operating at its current level. They fear that the program, and its benefits to communities at the grass-roots level, will disappear without it.

AmeriCorps provides money for college tuition or to repay student loans in exchange for domestic community service.

The program has been a favorite on Mr. Bush's domestic agenda. The president has called for an increase in the number of volunteers to 75,000 in the 2004 fiscal year, up from the 50,000 approved for 2003.

However, AmeriCorps is operating under more conservative accounting rules this year, reducing the number of slots available to 35,000 -- and even that figure is misleading, some Congressional aides have said (The Chronicle, June 27).

Management problems at the Corporation for National and Community Service, the organization that runs AmeriCorps and other service programs, led the corporation to approve 72,000 slots in the 2002 fiscal year, even though it had only enough money for education awards for 50,000 slots. To make up for that overenrollment, Congress insisted that the remaining 22,000 positions roll over into the current fiscal year. That obligation, in addition to the new accounting procedures, could mean the agency has enough funds for only 13,000 more slots this year.

Such a decrease would mean the wholesale shutdown of programs and leave some states without any AmeriCorps volunteers at all, according to a statement distributed at the news conference.

Marsha Meeks Kelly, executive director of the Mississippi Commission for Volunteer Service, said that she would lose 95 percent of her volunteers if the bill is not passed. Most of her volunteers are single parents who are the first in their families to go to college. Removing the chance for them to participate in AmeriCorps, she said, would eliminate their chances of attending college.

Additionally, the 50,000-person cap that Congress imposed in 2003 for the first time will mean that "higher education will be virtually cut out of the AmeriCorps community," said Nicole Boothman-Shepard, executive director of the Rhode Island Service Alliance. AmeriCorps has many levels of participation, and college students tend to participate part-time or less. Because Congress allowed only 50,000 people to participate in AmeriCorps in 2003, Ms. Boothman-Shepard said, college students will be the first participants that nonprofit organizations will cut to make sure that more part-time and full-time volunteers can participate.

Sens. Barbara A. Mikulski, a Maryland Democrat, and Christopher S. (Kit) Bond, a Missouri Republican, introduced a bill, S 1276, last week to help out AmeriCorps. The bill would enact new accounting measures that would allow the corporation to finance education awards according to historical rates of usage, instead of requiring it to hold reserves in the full amount for every participant. That change would allow the corporation to enroll a full 50,000 participants this year.

With strong bipartisan support, the bill and its companion bill in the House passed within 31 hours of introduction. President Bush said last week that he would support it.

When Senator Mikulski announced her bill, she also called for the resignation of Leslie Lenkowsky, the chief executive officer of the Corporation for National and Community Service, for allowing the overenrollment to occur, failing to fix the problem, and allowing a "persistent pattern of mismanagement at AmeriCorps."

"These past few weeks have shown the strong support for AmeriCorps at all levels," said Sandy Scott, a spokesman for AmeriCorps. Given the new legislation, he said, AmeriCorps would be able to support approximately 30,000 new positions in 2003, on top of the 20,000 rolled over from last year that are expected to participate.

Mr. Scott said that Mr. Lenkowsky intends to return to teaching at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis sometime this fall. Mr. Lenkowsky took a two-year appointment from President Bush in 2001 to head the corporation.