Remarks at Frank W. Ballou Senior High School

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Feb 7, 2000 by Bill Clinton

First of all, we ought to have a goal. I believe in having big goals. If you have big goals and you work towards them, even if you don't quite get there, you look around, and you find you've come a long way. If you don't have big goals, you don't get much done. What should our big goal be? Our big goal should be to make connection to the Internet as common as connection to telephones is today. That's what our big goal ought to be.

And I think we should start by making sure that every community has a technology center that serves not just young people but adults as well. [Applause] Yes, you can clap for that. That's all right. I don't want to take credit for this. We started doing this 2 years ago because Congresswoman Maxine Waters from California, who is here today, who was then chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, brought this idea to our attention. She said, "You ought to have community technology centers everywhere for the adults, for the people who aren't in the schools. They need access to this, too."

These centers were working so well that we tripled our investment in them last year. And I have given Congress a budget that will triple our investment in them again so we can have 1,000 community centers with computers serving the adults of America who otherwise would not have access to them. Thank you very much, Congresswoman Waters, and I hope we can pass it.

Second, we want to join with the private sector to bring more computers and Internet access into the homes of low income people. Public-spirited members of the high-tech community have already helped us--pledged to help us on this. I know of at least two places in America where there is a serious program, thanks to the private sector, not only to hookup all the classrooms but to give more low income students' parents computers in their homes and make sure they know how to E-mail the school and keep working back and forth on the homework, on the progress of life in school.

In one of these districts in particular, in New Jersey, where a lot of the students are first-generation immigrants whose parents' main language is not English, there has been an explosion in student performance, in part because the net has enabled the parents who are working all day, who are busy, who hardly have enough money to support their children, but because they're connected, they can be directly involved through E-mail in their children's education. It made a big difference. And we need to recognize that as much as we can do with the community centers, which we ought to do now, eventually we're going to have to give home access to low income people just like the rest of us have, and I think we should be working on it.

Third thing I want to do is to ask Congress to give private companies a couple of billion dollars--that's a lot of money--in tax incentives to get them to build and support these community technology centers, donate quality computers, and provide computer training.

Fourth, I want to do more to give--this is a big issue--I bet you notice this here; I bet some teachers know this--we must do more to give quality technology training to all of our new teachers in America, to make sure they're as good with computers as they are with textbooks. You can have all the computers in the world, and if the kids know more about it than the teachers--which is often the case, at least, if they're as technologically challenged as I have been in my life--we'll be behind.