Remarks at the Earle High School Dedication Ceremony in Earle, Arkansas

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Dec 20, 1999

And we passed something called the Telecommunications Act. For the first time in 60 years, we revised our communications laws, and the part of that we said we'll have this E-rate, which will give a discount to schools. Now, here, you connected the computers that you got from our technology literacy challenge grant to the Internet with the help of $100,000 in discounts for the E-rate. That's what it meant to Earle--$100,000 in discounts so you could afford to be on the Internet just like the wealthiest school districts in the United States of America.

In the budget I signed last month there will be another $60 million in educational investments coming to the Delta, including $7 million to hire 200 more teachers for smaller classes in the early grades, which I think is very important.

Now, to give you an idea--I'm kind of proud of this, but when we said--when Al Gore and I started working on this, only 3 percent of the total classrooms in America and 14 percent of the total schools had any Internet hookup. Now, over 50 percent of the classrooms and over 80 percent of the schools in America in just 5 years are hooked up to the Internet and can afford to be, thanks to this E-rate So you're a part of the future. And I want to thank you for that.

Now, what I'd like to do now is to announce a generous new initiative coming not from the Government but from MCI WorldGom Foundation, to give the teachers at Earle High School and across the Delta region unprecedented access to the kind of world-class educational materials that in the past only the wealthiest school districts could afford. In cooperation with National Geographic and Mr. Ferris' National Endowment for the Humanities, the Foundation--the MCI WorldCom Foundation--has developed a wonderful website called MarcoPolo.

It contains lesson plans and resource materials on everything from history to math to art. These lesson plans for teachers have been developed by some of our finest teachers and academics. And now they're available absolutely free over the Internet, thanks to MCI.

Now, to take advantage--who is here from MCI? Stand up. Everybody from MCI, stand up. Thank you. Give them a hand. [Applause]

Now, so that the teachers can utilize the website, the MarcoPolo foundation will train, free of charge, as many as 4,500 district curriculum specialists throughout the seven-State, Mississippi Delta region. They will then train 100,000-plus teachers on how to use the website.

A teacher in Earle, for example, will learn to go to the website, click on humanities, and be guided to a series of lesson plans on, say, the life of Socrates, developed by the experts at the National Endowment for the Humanities. The lesson plan then links to sites containing Plato's writing on Socrates--commentary by leading scholars. Then, it would provide questions teachers can ask students, such as imagining whether Socrates would have chosen to die for his ideas if Martin Luther King had been in a jail cell with him. It's a very interesting question. I think the answer to that is, probably. The site then links Dr. King's letter from the Birmingham jail, where King praises Socrates for being, and I quote, "A tension in the mind, so that an individual could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths." Now, just imagine helping high school students explore the idea of civil disobedience from Socrates to Martin Luther King over a period of 2,500 years, and being able to do it in every single school, no matter how rural, no matter how poor, no matter how distant, anywhere in the United States of America because of the generosity of MCI and this program. We thank them again.