Adding language to a Congressional budget agreement, U.S. Senator Susan Collins may have found a way to help the University of Maine Presque Isle’s Upward Bound program avoid losing funding due to a bureaucratic technicality.
Earlier this spring, the Presque Isle campus found itself among dozens of institutions whose applications for continuing funding for the college readiness program Upward Bound were denied by the U.S. Department of Education.
UMPI’s two related applications, totalling $600,000 for Upward Bound programs serving around 100 students in Aroostook County, were denied due to a formatting error: two infographics that did not have the double-spacing required by the agency.
The DOE’s decision set off a wave of complaints from current and former students and lawmakers about the unfairness of the federal agency’s “arbitrary requirements.” UMPI’s Upward Bound programs have been helping first-generation and lower-income college students since 1980.
Lawmakers previously asked federal Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to reverse the denied application, and now Collins has included a provision in the pending federal budget legislation to urge the DOE to let UMPI and other schools fix their formatting errors.
“It is absurd that the Department of Education rejected the University of Maine at Presque Isle’s application over a minor spacing issue,” Sen. Collins said in a media release.
“I fought hard to obtain language that strongly encourages the Department to take another look at these applications and not reject them for small formatting problems that have nothing to do with the merits of the applications nor the students that they serve.”
The grants under question would total $600,000 and serve an estimated 900 or more students in Aroostook County over the five years of the grant cycle.
