Technicality may end student program

CHELSEA - It was just a computer glitch on a federal government website. But it could force the closing of an award-winning program that has helped thousands of low-income students of this working-class city enter some of the nation's most elite universities.

Choice Thru Education, which for decades has provided Chelsea students with tutoring, classes for the high school equivalency test, career counseling, and intensive summer programs at major universities, will probably run out of money in a few months because the US Department of Education has refused to reconsider the program's grant proposal. The program's request for grants arrived 46 minutes late after an error on the department's website foiled repeated efforts to file it through the federal electronic grant-filing system.

The potential demise of the program, founded in 1966, has sparked outrage from the state's congressional delegation and allegations that the Bush administration is using the error as a pretext to dismantle a program started during President Lyndon B. Johnson's War on Poverty.

At the program's timeworn office in the former parachute factory on Pearl Street, where the building's age is visible on the paint-flaking walls, battered carpet, and dumpy furniture, pendants of the universities attended by its graduates - MIT, Dartmouth, Duke, Tufts - hang from the walls. Susan Clark, the program's director, pointed to other banners in the office, hung last year to celebrate the program's 40th anniversary.

"I just hope they don't mark our memorial," she said.

Senators John F. Kerry and Edward M. Kennedy have written several letters to department officials, asking them to grant the program its request of $1.2 million over the next four years.

Last week, after his letters had been ignored, Kerry called a senior official at the department, who told him nothing could be done, the senator said in a phone interview.

"Everything the administration does is ideological," Kerry said. "They bend the rules and break the rules for their cronies, but they're unwilling to protect the people who most need it. We think it's disgraceful."

Officials at the Department of Education did not respond to repeated calls seeking comment.

However, the department had acknowledged a problem with the site and had extended the filing deadline by a day until Nov. 7, 2006.

Clark said she had begun trying to file an application on Nov. 5, but the system would not accept Choice Thru Education's username and password.

Clark said she and colleagues spent Nov. 6 trying to file the grant application electronically, while making repeated calls to Grants.gov and department officials seeking guidance. Because of the problems filing electronically, she sent a hard copy of the application by overnight mail, which was postmarked Nov. 6 at 4:22 p.m. She said the program succeeded in sending the application electronically at 5:16 p.m. Nov. 7, and that she received an automated message saying the department was reviewing the proposal.

On May 9, six months after she had filed the program's grant proposal, Clark received a letter saying the application should have been in by 4:30 p.m., and that the hard copy had also arrived too late.

A department official acknowledged in the letter the problem on the Grants.gov site, but said the grant was "determined to be ineligible for consideration of funding because it was submitted after the deadline."

Clark said she had no idea the program would have its application rejected - or that it had been deemed late - until she received the department's letter.

In response, she wrote: "Over 3,000 of our many students have gone to post-secondary school. Chelsea's children need this program. Clearly, you cannot mean to deprive the public of this necessary program because you had a glitch."

The next letter the program received from the department included instructions telling Clark's staff how to close out the balance of the existing grant, which expired in August.

Since then, Kerry and Kennedy and Representative Mike Capuano of Somerville have written to the department, without success.

In a joint letter they sent to the director of the department's higher education programs, the three wrote: "Constituents - and the students they serve - should not be penalized because of computer glitches that are beyond their control. . . . The difficulties encountered were completely out of their hands."

The department responded to Kennedy in a letter sent late yesterday. "The Department does not have the discretion to waive the deadline nor the flexibility to alter Grants.gov requirements," wrote Diane Jones, an assistant secretary in the department's office of postsecondary education.

Over the summer, Congress overturned the department's rejection of five similar programs for low-income students in Massachusetts. But lawmakers had no power to reinstate grants for Choice Thru Education, because the department never reviewed its application - despite the automated response Clark had received.

Advocates for low-income students said the rejection of the applications reflects an effort by the department in recent years to cut some $450 million designated by the federal government for programs to help low-income students get into college.

"Assisting low-income, first-generation students to overcome the barriers to get into college has not been this administration's priority - that's very clear," said Susan Trebach, a spokeswoman for the Council for Opportunity in Education, a Washington-based group that lobbies for low-income students. "Why else kill the programs that work?"

Reggie Jean, president for Massachusetts Educational Opportunity Association in Boston, called the situation a "tremendous loss" for Chelsea.

"I think this is really ideological and calculated by the executive branch to cut these programs and put the money into programs they prefer," Jean said.

Officials in Chelsea are wondering how they will cope with the loss of a program that has helped keep students in school in a city where more than a quarter of the 2006 high school class dropped out before graduation.

"Without the program, it's not a stretch to say that a lot of kids will have difficulty finding their way to college and to succeed in life," said Jay Ash, city manager of Chelsea, adding that the city has no money to cover the costs of the program. "This would be a significant blow to Chelsea."

At the program's office, high school dropouts play pool and study for the General Educational Development, or high school equivalency, exams.

In a GED class this week, Hamilton Rodriguez, a 16-year-old who dropped out of high school this year, said he did not know what he would do without the program.

"I want to try to be somebody," he said. "This would be a really bad idea to cancel this. We'd be doing nothing."

Ann Marie Nolan, 19, said she had tried to go back to school, but it never worked. "This is my only chance," she said. "If there was no program, I'd be wandering the streets -either that or staying home and doing nothing, absolutely nothing."

To keep the computer labs, GED classes, and doors open for as long as possible, Clark said she has laid off staff, reduced her salary and other staff salaries by as much as half, and cut programs such as taking students on college tours, peer leadership groups, and cultural enrichment trips.

She now helps take out the trash, answer phones, sweep floors, and clean bathrooms. She says the program has only enough money to last until late February and may not be able to organize its annual citywide distribution of toys to parents who can't afford them.

About a month ago, because the program cannot afford a receptionist in its front office, someone walked in during the day and stole a computer where the receptionist would usually sit.

"I just don't understand this," Clark said. "What makes more sense than helping kids who need help? The crazy part is they're ending this on a technicality that was their fault."

David Abel can be reached at dabel@globe.com.