Remarks at the White House Conference on School Safety

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Oct 19, 1998

[The panel discussion continued.]

The President. Thank you very much. First of all, I want to apologize to all of you, and in particular to Mayor Corradini, who made a terrific presentation, according to the First Lady. I got a call. We just completed our agreement on the budget and the negotiations. In a half hour or so, for the members of the press, we'll have a statement about that.

But let me say, first, I think about Congressman Etheridge, it is - one of the things that we desperately - that we need so much in Congress - Congress works better when there are people in the Congress who have all kinds of different experiences that are relevant. It's an incredible gift that we have a Member of the House of Representatives that was actually a State superintendent of public instruction. And the influence he can have on other Members and the role he can play in the years ahead I think is virtually limitless just because of the life he lived before he came there. And I'm very grateful for what he said today and for what he's done.

I would also like to thank Mayor Corradini for the report, for the recommendations, and for the "Best Practices" booklet. I think that we need - every single challenge we've got in this country, we'd be a lot better off if everybody who was working on it issued a "Best Practices" book, because one of my pet theories is that everybody solved every problem somewhere, but we're not very good at playing copycat when we ought to. So I thank her for that.

The only other thing I want to say, and then I want to turn it over to the Vice President and let him ask a question, is that the mayors recommended new youth counselors, and Bob talked about other kinds of support personnel on security issues. One of the things that we had to fight hardest for in 1983, that Hillary convinced me we ought to do 15 years ago, was to require every elementary school to have a counselor. But 15 years later, it looks like a pretty good decision.

And I think we have to - with people who have to pay for these things, with the taxpayers and others who may not deal with it, we need to let them know that a well-trained counselor dealing with the kind of challenges these children face is a terrific investment. And I appreciate the recommendation of the mayors, and I look forward to following up on them.

[The panel discussion continued.]

The President. Well, it would depend on whether it was an elementary school or higher grades. If you start with an elementary school, I would have an elementary school that would have classes of between 15 and 20 in the early grades. I would have a maximum number of kids in the school of about 300. I would have - and about 1,000 for the high school. I would have the support personnel. I'd have all the teachers trained, and I'd have a parent coordinator that had huge numbers of the parents coming in and out of the schools all the time.

And then I'd try to figure out how to make young people like Liberty the rule rather than the exception. That is - I was sitting here when she was telling her story - I was thinking about - she got to the Boys and Girls Club, and that's a good thing, but there's a whole bunch of kids that live in the place where she does that 'didn't get there, and that's not a good thing. And so I think that would mean you'd either have comprehensive before- and after-school programs and summer school programs for the kids on site, or there would be some system by which the school, in effect, connected every child to responsible adult community groups of some kind that Professor Earls says works so well.