Remarks at the White House Conference on School Safety

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Oct 19, 1998

October 15, 1998

The President. Thank you. Your kindness is interfering with my determination to stay on schedule. [Laughter] But thank you very much. I want to thank Secretary Riley and Attorney General Reno for their devotion and consistent work on this matter. I thank the Vice President. He and Hillary and I are delighted to have all of you here at the White House today, and the many, many people all across America who are joining us, thanks to the technological revolution.

I thank the Members of Congress who are here. And Governor, thank you for coming, and the mayors and the other members of the administration, and all the distinguished citizens who are here. Our good friend Edward James Olmos, thank you for being here.

I saw a survey, a public opinion survey, a few months ago that asked the American people what they thought the most important story of the first 6 months of 1998 was, and dwarfing everything else was the concern our people had for the children who were killed in their schools. And I think that your presence here and the number of people who are involved all across America, the quality of the panelists and, indeed, the courage of many of them - the mother of one of the children killed at Jonesboro, Arkansas, in my home State, was on the morning panel with Hillary - this is truly a moving thing. And it's a very important thing for our country.

You know, when I leave here - and I hope I don't have to leave before this panel is over, but I think all of you know that we have been able to put together a conference for several days, a meeting between the Prime Minister of Israel and the Chairman of the PLO in our attempts to make the next big step toward peace in the Middle East. And I got to thinking about it on the way over here today, as I was walking over from the Oval Office, and all the things I'm trying to get these people to lay down and get over and give up, so they can go on with their children's future, so that we can stop innocent children from being killed in the place in the world that is the home of the world's three great monotheistic religions.

It's all a part of our attempt not to give up on anybody and not to permit hatred or anger to destroy even one child's life anywhere. And if we're going to do that elsewhere in the world, to try to be a force for good, then we have to be as good as we can here at home. And all of you are trying to help us achieve that, and I'm very, very grateful to you.

Because this is the only chance I'll have to do it today, and because all of you care so much about education, I'd like to just take a moment to talk about where these budget negotiations are on Capitol Hill. They're about to conclude, I hope. They've certainly gone on long enough. But we're not quite there yet. However, even though there are still points outstanding, I believe we'll succeed. And as the Vice President said, one thing we know already, we know that now this budget will reflect a major commitment to education and to the future of our children.

I am very pleased it will make the first installment on our plan to hire 100,000 new teachers. You heard the Vice President's catalog of the class size issue, but the Secretary of Education tells me that we haven't fully grasped it because, unlike the baby boom, we think that this increase in our children will go on more or less indefinitely, and we've got a lot of very fine teachers in the classroom who will be retiring in the next few years. So this is a huge challenge for us.

The United States has never before done anything like this. And there were a lot of people who honestly thought I was wrong to fight for this or they disagreed with me, but it seems to me that we had enough experience when we put 100,000 police on the street. I was told the United States had never done anything like that before. We didn't have anything to do with telling the cities where the police should go, but the results have been pretty satisfactory. And everywhere I go, someone mentions it to me.

If it worked there and we have crime at a 25-year low, how much more important is it to put the children in the classroom? And this will make a major downpayment toward our goal of an average class size of 18 in the early grades, very different from what has been reported.

And I should also say that when the Attorney General and the Secretary of Education went out across the country in the wake of all of these school shootings and they met with educators and they met with people talking about how we can prevent these things from happening in the first place, one of the things that they were told was, "Get us small classes in the early grades so that we can get to know these children, find out the ones who obviously have got some serious problems, and try to get them the help they need before their lives and others' are irrevocably changed." So this is a very, very good day for the United States.

There were some other very important educational initiatives that will be fully supported: our child literacy drive, to make sure every child can read independently by the end of the third grade; our college mentoring drive, to help lower-income students prepare for college and to be able to tell every one of them what kind of financial aid they'll get if they stay in school and learn their lessons and stay out of trouble. It increases support for Head Start, expands the number of innovative charter schools. There are now a thousand of those schools in America; there was one when I became President, and there will be 3,000 before we're done in 2000. We will provide for half a million summer jobs for our young people, a program that many had sought to eliminate. It will provide for after-school programs for a quarter million young people. And I think we all know how important that is.