Remember six years ago, when all the living presidents and thousands of do-gooders came together in Philadelphia for a red-white-and-blue moment in which they pledged five promises to America’s youth?

Me neither. Even though I was there, I had to refresh my memory on the details of the first (and, so far, only) presidential summit on volunteerism. That’s how little attention we’re paying to youth development these days.

The convener of that summit went on to become U.S. secretary of state. Individual communities are doing their individual thing, and the rest of us have forgotten to hold accountable all the organizations that pledged to try harder to help children most in need.

But one promise, the key promise, hasn’t been forgotten. The goal of ensuring that every child has a caring adult in his or her life has even found its way onto the agenda of those who dole out money in Washington, in the form of a $150 million request by the White House to fund mentoring programs for the disadvantaged.

“With 17 million at-risk children growing up in America, the need for a proven strategy to reverse the statistics and to support their successful development has never been more critical,” Judy Vredenburgh, president of Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, told Congress this week.

Hard to argue with that. The one-on-one mentoring relationships sponsored by her organization for nearly a century are proven to help dissuade “littles” from substance abuse, truancy, and other risky behaviors. And Big Brothers kept the promise it made at the summit, by more than doubling the number of kids it mentors in 470 affiliates across the nation.

So who wouldn’t applaud the Bush administration for wanting to pour extra funding into strategies that repay society many times over?

Only those who can clap with one hand. Because, true to form when it comes to domestic — and not military — programs, what the Bush administration giveth, it also taketh away.

Only more so.

For while pledging more funding to mentor the disadvantaged, the administration wants to cut its principal after-school program by 40 percent, which critics say will leave half a million kids with no place to go during what are, for them, the most dangerous hours of the day.

“It is, frankly, outrageous,” says Sandy Newman, president of Fight Crime: Invest in Kids, an organization of police chiefs, sheriffs and prosecutors who believe the best way to reduce crime by and against teenagers is to provide constructive alternatives after school.

This would be more understandable if it were an equal swap between two competing philosophical models. And that’s what the Bush administration would like us to believe is happening.

The cut in funding to the $1 billion-a-year federal after-school program was supposedly prompted by the results of a study that found little academic improvement among students in the program, although they did spend more time with teachers and their parents were more involved in school.

Critics complain that the study examined the federal program when it was only two years old, and didn’t try to look at the most effective after-school programs for success stories. (There are several in Philadelphia.) Still, if the administration decided to shift after-school resources into mentoring, shouldn’t total funding be held constant?

Nah. Instead, the White House proposes to cut $400 million from the after-school program for “one year — nearly the amount it proposed to spend on mentoring over the course of “three years.

There’s no reduction in need, believe me. Not when the Children’s Defense Fund says the number of black children living in extreme poverty rose sharply since 2000, to the highest level in more than two decades.

Government ought to assess its social programs — which is why a proven winner like Big Brothers deserves more support. But that shouldn’t become an excuse to forget all the children in need. Promises ought to be kept.