Hope and Fail

Missing pledge to double after school funding by 97 percent

Not only did the president sign the 2010 obmibus appropriations bill in a hurry, the Education Department’s portion of the bill missed the mark Barack Obama promised during the campaign: To double funding for after school programs.

The Obama campaign promised this:

Expanding access to high-quality afterschool programs will help children learn and strengthen a broad range of skills and provide relief to working parents who have to juggle child care and work responsibilities. Barack Obama will double funding for the main federal support for afterschool programs, the 21st Century Learning Centers program, to serve one million more children. Obama will include measures to maximize performance and effectiveness across grantees nationwide.

The transition team also made that promise:

Obama and Biden will double funding for the main federal support for afterschool programs, the 21st Century Learning Centers program, to serve one million more children.

But the education budget Obama signed includes a measly 3 percent increase in after school program funding.

In fact, throughout the legislative process federal funding for afterschool programs never came close to a 100 percent increase. From PolitiFact:

When the House approved its version of the appropriations bill, it actually added $50 million for the program to what the president had requested. The Senate stuck to the president’s amount. When negotiators from both chambers hammered out a compromise, they upped the amount by $35 million, to a little under $1.2 billion. So the amount the president signed into law was about 3 percent higher than the fiscal year 2009 level — not double, as he had promised.

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