Remarks in a roundtable discussion with students on violence in schools at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Virginia

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, April 26, 1999

April 22, 1999

The President. Thank you, Mr. Porter. I think all of you know that we are being joined by several million students through various media outlets that are covering this, and so let me begin by saying I'm delighted to be here at T.C. Williams High School. Thank you, Mr. Porter. Our superintendent, Herb Berg, is here, and I'm glad to be back in this school district again that has hosted me for so many important educational announcements.

Senator Robb and Congressman Jim Moran are both here with us, along with Mayor Kerry Donley. I thank them for joining us, and our two teachers, Ellen Harmon and Barbara Finney.

I want to spend most of my time today listening to you. I have a few questions I want to ask, and I'm going to turn it over to the teachers as soon as I make a few opening remarks. But I got up this morning, and I made some notes and worked over them again, and I'd like to say just a few things.

First of all, we're here, obviously, because of the terrible tragedy in Littleton, Colorado, and because, even though it is the worst example of school violence we've seen, it is by no means the only one. And indeed, I think that some of the people joining us today are from Paducah, Kentucky, and Jonesboro, Arkansas - at least those two communities which had examples of school violence last year.

I think it's important that all over America students and teachers have a chance to discuss their feelings about this, their ideas about what we should do, and it's especially important for younger children, who might be quite traumatized and wonder whether they are, in fact, safe at school. So I want to talk a little about all of that.

There is really nothing more important than keeping our schools safe. And we've tried to do a lot of things in that regard over the last few years, having a zero tolerance for guns and drugs policy, putting new community police officers in schools where they're needed, trying to support more counselors in schools, more after-school, more mentoring programs, more conflict resolution programs. We've tried to help school districts and students and teachers, who wanted to do it, to have - for younger children, elementary and junior high school - using school uniform policies or dress code policies where they wanted to implement those things. But we know that there are things which have to be done sort of beyond the Government and beyond anything Government can do.

I spent a lot of time thinking about this, but I want to say, last night and today I thought about the work that my wife has done on this for many years, and I went back and reread the chapters in her book that deal with the problems that children have in coping with violence and the responsibilities of parents and the larger society. I thought about the work that the Vice President's wife, Tipper Gore, started doing well over a decade ago on this whole issue. And I think we have to ask ourselves some pretty hard questions here. What are the responsibilities of students themselves? What are the responsibilities of schools? What are the responsibilities of parents? What is the role of the larger culture here? Is there a sense in which the fact that all of you are exposed to much higher levels of violence through television, through video games, that you can actually figure out how to make bombs on the Internet - does that make a difference? Does it make these kinds of things more likely to happen? What are our responsibilities?

But before I open it to you, I'd just like to make one other comment. I think, particularly for young people who may be quite frightened as a result of this, or for parents who may wonder about the safety of schools, I think it's worth restating two or three basic things.

First of all, on balance, our schools are still the safest place our kids can be in most communities under most or all circumstances.

Secondly, I think it's worth reminding everyone that in spite of these horrible instances, our country is still fundamentally a good and decent place, and our people are good and decent people. And we have seen the way the community of Littleton responded to this: people standing in line for hours to give blood, people showing up to volunteer their services as counselors and in other ways, with the way people have reached out to each other. We see a kind of microcosm of how America has reacted to this.

And I think it's important that the young people of our country know this and that the parents know this, that they should remember we - as horrible as this is, we have seen once again what is basically decent and good about America. And we should remember that most schools are more nearly represented by the kind of conversation we're having around here today than by the horrible incident we saw in Colorado.

So I think that's enough for me to say. But I'm interested in what you think about it, what your reactions are, what you've done here to try to avoid this, and what you think the responsibilities of the rest of us are, starting at home and going all the way up to the President, and also the cultural issues I mentioned.