A prominent Stanford tutoring program may soon be abandoned to make room for President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind education law.

Upward Bound, a nationwide college preparation program with a local branch run out of the Haas Center for Public Service, is on the chopping block in the president’s budget proposal for next year. If the proposal is approved, Stanford Upward Bound stands to lose its entire $350,000 yearly operating budget.

Bush is proposing to eliminate many Department of Education programs in order to make way for $8 billion more funding for No Child Left Behind. In the three years since that program was signed into law, it has been widely criticized as being severely under-funded.

Stanford Upward Bound currently serves 76 students at four lower-income high schools in the surrounding high schools, according to Assistant Director Brian Aguilar. The tutoring is provided by roughly 40 Stanford student volunteers.

Aguilar said that word circulated within the education community that large cuts would be included in the national budget even before the proposal was released publicly, and that work is already underway at the local, regional and national levels to save Upward Bound and programs like it.

“Efforts will be made by the staff here and at the Haas Center to make sure that students that are served by these programs continue to be served and that the college students who are participating continue to be a part of it,” Aguilar said.

Staff members at the Haas Center have indicated that they want to keep the program running, according to Aguilar, but at the moment most efforts are targeted at the national level, where Bush’s budget still needs to be approved by Congress.

Aguilar said that he would be advising students, staff and administrators who want to get involved to contact lawmakers in Washington, D.C.

“The difficulty is in not knowing how long this budget process is going to drag out,” he said. “A lot of the decision making about this is going to take place in D.C.”

Upward Bound is part of a cluster of programs, called TRIO, that were created to provide educational opportunities for low-income and disabled Americans. Talent Search — another TRIO program that identifies and assists students from low-income backgrounds who have the potential to take advantage of higher education — would also be eliminated under the proposal.

Cutting Upward Bound would free up $312 billion in the Department of Education’s budget. The official budget summary claimed that “the program has limited overall impact because services are not sufficiently well targeted to higher-risk students.”

Upward Bound and Talent Search currently serve about 455,000 students nationwide.

The local impact at Stanford could be significant.

As Aguilar points out, “There are a number of alumni who were formerly a part of these TRIO programs who currently either work at or are actually students at Stanford.”

Senior Maria Anaya received tutoring through Stanford Upward Bound when she was a student at Sequoia High School in Redwood City. Now she is the head tutoring coordinator for the program on campus.

Neither of Anaya’s parents attended college, and she said that Upward Bound provided her with academic support throughout high school. In particular, she said that her tutors were critical in guiding her through the application process for Stanford and other colleges.

“My favorite part about being program coordinator is seeing a lot of the students apply to college and hearing that they got in,” Anaya said. “I just found out that one of the students got into Santa Clara University and that made me really happy.”