Lydell Henry is the founder of Beat the Streets Baltimore, a community-based wrestling program that provides academic support and mentorship for children in third through 12th grades. He relies on AmeriCorps members oversee academic interventions for participating students, helping making leaps in their skills sets and ensuring most graduate high school.

But after the Trump administration implemented cuts to AmeriCorps late last week, Henry is unsure if he can continue running programs across the city, and he doesn’t know how he’ll finance coach salaries. He is concerned that Beat the Streets, which heavily relies on grants, may not be able to host its programming over the summer.“We’ve been in existence for 13 years, and for 13 years we’ve had summer camps,” Henry said. “This is the first year that it’s been jeopardized to the point where we don’t know how we’re going to do it, but we’re going to try to make every effort to sustain what we’ve built over the last 13 years.”

‘Immediate termination’

According to Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown’s office, the Trump administration ended over 20 of the state’s AmeriCorps programs after close of business Friday, resulting in the revocation of more than $12 million in federal funding and an immediate work stoppage for members.

Brown, a Democrat, filed a lawsuit with a coalition of 23 attorneys general Tuesday challenging the Trump administration’s actions to dismantle AmeriCorps.

In justifying the cuts, the White House pointed to $40 million in “improper payments” reported by AmeriCorps last year, which it attributed to calculation errors, miscoded expenses and insufficient documentation from grant recipients.

“President Trump has the legal right to restore accountability to the entire Executive Branch,” White House Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly said in an email to the Associated Press.

AmeriCorps is an independent federal agency that facilitates community-based service for over 200,000 Americans annually. Members receive stipends and financial awards to advance their education.

Maryland officials scrambled last Friday to inform service members and beneficiaries like Henry that cuts made by the Trump administration to AmeriCorps would disrupt or terminate their programming, as over 250 service members in the state were abruptly left without jobs.

“We had to start making immediate calls … to inform them of the immediate termination of their grants,” Paul Monteiro, the secretary of the Maryland Department of Service and Innovation, said Wednesday. “Many of our members will likely face subsistence-level challenges, given they’re ineligible for unemployment insurance and were already living on modest stipends.”

Monteiro oversees the Governor’s Commission on Service and Volunteerism, which is responsible for awarding AmeriCorps grants to nonprofits and public sector agencies. He said his department is actively working to support recently terminated members with access to housing and food. The Trump administration has said that AmeriCorps members will still receive a prorated financial award to continue their education.

Monteiro said the whiplash of AmeriCorps funding cuts will mean that “public lands will go untended,” nonprofits will “lose bandwidth” and classrooms statewide will have less support for students.

‘Totally devastating’

It’s unclear what the full impact will be on local schools. Moore administration officials are still analyzing site-level data this week to determine the direct impact the AmeriCorps grant cancellations for education programming will have on classrooms statewide.

Teach for America, an education program funded by AmeriCorps, has a partnership with Baltimore City public schools, with a network of approximately 1,400 alumni and current participants.

According to the Teach for America Baltimore website, over 400 Baltimore teachers and 10% of principals are program alumni.

Maryland Senate President Bill Ferguson, who participated in Teach for America at Southwestern High School from 2005 to 2007, said that his experience with AmeriCorps was “one of the most transformative” of his life, and put him in a position to “work on really hard challenges” with people that had “very different life experiences.”

Ferguson said he finds the Trump administration cuts “totally devastating” and said there are likely kids who were receiving tutoring from members on Friday that have had the rug “pulled out from under them” when they did not show up to help them on Monday.

Maryland Conservation Corps to shut down

Facing an even greater immediate impact is the Maryland Conservation Corps program, which provides young adults with a service-year opportunity to participate in natural resource management and park conservation.

Maryland Department of Natural Resources Secretary Josh Kurtz said that the Maryland Conservation Corps was an inaugural program when AmeriCorps began under President Bill Clinton.

“If you’ve hiked on a trail, if you’ve gone to a bathroom in a state park, you most likely are touching a project that Maryland Conservation Corps has done over the years,” Kurtz said. “The AmeriCorps funding has been really foundational for us, and forces us to … pretty immediately shut down the core program for this year.”

Rachel Temby, the deputy director Maryland Park Service, said that over 100 program alumni have pursued public service careers among state and local government agencies, nonprofits, educational institutions and private sector jobs. More than 50 Maryland Conservation Corps alumni are currently working at the Maryland Department of Natural Resources.

Temby said that, despite immediately being pulled from service, many Conservation Corps members made the “independent and very considerate decision” to continue their daily assignments Saturday as park volunteers.

“These members, truly, are here to serve, and we are here in service of them today,” said Temby.

Have a news tip? Contact Hannah Gaskill at hgaskill@baltsun.com.