Remarks at Central High School in Davenport, Iowa

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, May 8, 2000

May 3, 2000

Hello. I think we should give Barb Hess another hand. She did a good job on her speech. [Applause] And your principal, Mr. Caudle, give him another hand. [Applause] And your great Governor, Governor Tom Vilsack, I'm glad to be here with him. Thank you. I also want to thank the Jazz Band and the Marching Band for playing. You did a great job today. Thank you very much.

I am glad to be here. I want to say I appreciated meeting at least two of your student leaders, Kelly Witt and Ricky Harris--thank them for--[applause]. And I want to thank Lieutenant Governor Sally Pederson, Attorney General Tom Miller, Secretary of Agriculture Patty Judge, and the director of education, Ted Stilwell for joining us today. And, Mayor Yerington, thank you for welcoming us back to Davenport. And the other Quad City mayors are here: Mayor Leach of Moline; Mayor Ward of East Moline; and Mayor Mark Schwiebert of Rock Island. I think I pronounced that properly, and if I didn't he can reprimand me later. [Laughter]

I'd like to thank your superintendent, Jim Blanche, for making us welcome here. And since we're here for construction purposes, to talk about better school buildings, I'm glad to be joined by the president of the Building and Construction Trades Union, Mr. Ed Sullivan. So thank you all for making me feel welcome.

I love this community. I came here in late 1992 on a bus with Hillary and with Al and Tipper Gore right before our election. Then I came back in 1993 after the terrible flood, and I watched you come back from that. And today I want to talk about another kind of building.

I'm in the process of going around the country for 2 days--we just left Owenshoro, Kentucky. And I want to do two things. I want, first of all, to make this trip an opportunity to show America how good the young people of our country are, and how much they are learning in our schools, and how bright their future is. But the second thing I want to do is to point out what challenges are still out there if every young person in America is going to have a world-class education.

And one of the things that we know is that you are not the only group of young people in school facilities that are either overcrowded or too old or both. And if we want learning to occur, we have got to give all of our students the facilities they need.

Now, this is a beautiful old school. It's even older than the high school I went to, which was built in 1917. I've been to the top floor. I've seen the physics lab. I went into a biology class. I went underneath the bleachers here, in the locker room. I saw where you have your meals in the cafeteria, which was built in the '85 extension. And I have been given a briefing by your principal on how you're going to handle the modernization.

But what you need to know is there are people all over this country who are in situations even more severe. In the city of Philadelphia, the average school building is 65 years old. In the city of New York there are still buildings heated in the winter with coal-fired furnaces, where people literally shovel coal into them like they did a hundred years ago.

We have school buildings so old they can't be hooked up--they cannot be wired to the Internet. The Vice President and I have worked for 6 years to connect every classroom in America to the Internet. When we started, 16 percent of the schools were connected and 3 percent of the classrooms. Today, 95 percent of the schools and almost 75 percent of the classrooms are connected.

But believe it or not, there are some which literally can't take a connection. And I saw some of your classrooms here today that have severe limits on what can be done in terms of electricity provision.

So what's all this got to do with what we're doing now? Well, when I became President, we could never have thought of doing anything for school construction or school modernization or repairs because we had a big deficit. Today, we're in the midst of our third budget surplus. By the end of this year we will have paid off $355 billion of our national debt. And I'm proud of that.

We are in the midst of the longest economic expansion in history. And the big question before the voters this year, and all the adult citizens of America that you young people can have an impact on--and some of you are old enough to vote now--is what are we going to do with our prosperity? So we've got the lowest unemployment rate in 30 years and the lowest welfare rolls in 30 years and the lowest female unemployment in 40 years and the lowest African-American and Hispanic unemployment ever recorded, so what are we going to do with it?

A lot of times, in free societies, when times are good, people do nothing. They just sort of hang around and enjoy it. That would be a terrible mistake, because we still have challenges. And one of the challenges we have--and everyone of you know it's true--education is more important than ever before. It's more important to you, and it's more important to your country.

We live in an information economy where what you know and what you can learn will determine in large measure the shape of your adult lives and the kind of lives you'll be able to give your own children. So one of the things that we have to do with our prosperity is to ask ourselves--let's take an inventory-- where are we not giving our young people a world-class education? Why are we not doing it? And what are we to do about it?