Education takes a big hit in President Bush’s final budget for Fiscal Year 2009.

The budget the president sent to Congress would cut or trim 50 programs to the tune of $3.8 billion, bring in another $6 billion in savings from student aid programs and make cuts to federal grants to states for adult and vocational education, training and employment services.

Among the programs taking a big hit is the Reading is Fundamental’s book distribution program, which serves more than 4 million children throughout the country.

That’s a loss of about $25 million, said Frank J. Walter, a spokesman for RIF, which is the largest children’s literacy organization in the country.

Founded in 1966, Reading Is Fundamental reaches out to underserved children from birth to age eight with volunteers in every state and U.S. territory. The distribution program provides 16 million new, free books and literacy resources annually. 

In 1975, Congress created the "Inexpensive Book Distribution Program," which gives federal matching funds to qualifying sites for RIF's national book program.

“The federal government funds up to about 80 percent of RIF’s overall budget,” Walter told BlackAmericaWeb.com. “It would be difficult to raise $25 million while the country is in recession.”

The program is safe for this year, Walter said, and the organization raised about $7 million last year from private sources. It’s the future that’s in question.

RIF has put a link on its Web site, which allows visitors to send a letter to their congressional representatives asking that the book distribution money be restored in the final version of the budget. There also is a link for those interested in making donations to the program.

So far, Walter said, about 11,000 letters have been sent to members of Congress.

“I thought it was pretty ironic that (Bush) is cutting the program, and his wife is sponsoring the National Book Festival. Reading Is Fundamental plays a big part in that every year,” said Theresa Dudley, a schoolteacher and a member of the Prince George’s County (Md.) Educators Association, an affiliate of the National Education Association.

The annual National Book Festival, sponsored by the Library of Congress and hosted by the first lady each fall, features a range of pavilions and activities across a number of literary genres for children, teenagers, adults and families and distributes free books to children.

“Nothing touches the life of a child more than a book,” Dudley told BlackAmericaWeb.com.  “I think we all remember the books we loved to read as kids, and this program puts books in the hands of children who might not otherwise get any.”

Dudley, who currently teaches seventh graders in a talented and gifted program at Kenmoor Middle School in Landover, said that over the years, she has taught children from disadvantaged backgrounds who never had an adult read a story to them.

“When it comes time to read a story that begins ‘Once upon a time,’ they don’t even know the word ‘once,’” Dudley said. “I think to cut a program like Reading Is Fundamental is a travesty.”

According to The New York Times, Bush’s 2009 budget estimates federal receipts will decline this year by $47 billion, to $2.5 trillion, mainly because of the soft economy and a decline in corporate income tax receipts. At the same time, federal spending is expected to rise by $201 billion, to a total of $2.9 trillion.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which conducts research and analysis to help the public better understand proposed budget and research policies, said the employment and training cuts in Bush’s budget are “particularly troublesome during weak economic conditions.”

Matt Fielder, a researcher assistant for the Center said the recession, “makes these cuts particularly salient. These would have been a bad idea anytime for learning and skill development and the ability to build a career and get ahead.”

Fielder told BlackAmericaWeb.com that the cuts in the Bush budget essentially reward the president’s pet areas: Increases in defense spending and the extension of tax cuts that help people at the top of the income spectrum.

“I don’t think the budget provides much evidence of shared pain,” Fielder said.

“The budget for several years running very much has not been a fiscally conservative budget.  That has led to very high annual deficits, and it’s not just because of homeland security (funding),” said Arloc Sherman, a senior researcher at the Center.

To be fair to the administration, Fielder said, “one place where there’s particularly good evidence of early childhood education funding is Head Start, which has seen a modest increase of about 11 percent since 2002.

“Getting kids into a good preschool environment does wonders in their lives for the future. That’s certainly one place where spending went up ... One thing to be up front about here, there was a significant increase the first few years. We’re still above where we were when he came into office,” Fiedler said.

That said, however, inadequate funding for the No Child Left Behind project, as well as other education and supplemental programs -- such as adequate child care, which helps working parents improve the quality of life for their children -- make it difficult to see how the president’s goal of radically improving American education can be achieve.

If funding cut from programs like Reading Is Fundamental is redirected to programs that could be more effective, there may be an argument for making the cuts. However, Sherman said, “It’s not terribly likely.”

Sherman and Fielder said the current budget as proposed is not likely to sail through Congress. Some programs will be restored and others will be cut or eliminated.

“But what we did see last year is last year’s of appropriation was maintained,” Fielder said, meaning the president won on the level of spending he sought.

The upshot is there’s a limit to what the president is willing to spend and, just like last fiscal year, Congress is unlikely to defy him on the bottom line.

“The appropriations side of the budget requires affirmative action from Congress, and it has to happen this year, and (Bush) has a veto," said Fielder. "Congress could decide to wait him out (and not pass a budget), but there’s a real cost to that, too, because agencies can’t plan their budgets and fund programs if they don’t know whether the money will be there.”

No matter what happens in the end to the budget, Dudley said, she is opposed to any cuts in education.

“We can send millions of dollars to Iraqi students because we blew up their schools, but we’re going to cut programs for our children? That just doesn’t make any sense to me,” said Dudley, who has taught first, fourth and fifth graders during her career.

“I’m teaching TAG (talented and gifted), and some of those kids don’t have good reading skills. The children who come from less advantaged backgrounds are the ones that are struggling the most,” Dudley said. “We’re spending money on a war that we don’t need to be fighting. We should be putting that money into our own children -- and especially children who just don’t have the money to buy books.”