Remarks at the National Education Association School Safety Summit in Los Angeles, California

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, April 17, 1995

Thank you. Thank you for your welcome. Thank you for your work. Thank you for that very moving film. Thank you, Keith Geiger, for your introduction and for your outstanding leadership of this organization. You know, Keith Geiger is quite a gardener, and it's quite a beautiful day. It shows you how devoted he is that he's even inside, much less giving a speech. [Laughter] Thank you, Dick Riley, for such a wonderful job as Secretary of Education and for those fine remarks. Senator Carol Moseley-Braun, I'm delighted to see you. We're a little out of place here today. It's actually a pretty good time to be in Washington, DC. The cherry blossoms are out - and so is Congress. [Laughter] It's a pretty good time to be there. [Laughter] I know there are a lot of Los Angeles county supervisors and city council members here today, and I see your distinguished police chief. I know there are other - [applause] - and I thank you for being here, sir.

I also know that this is not just a gathering of teachers. There are a lot of school support folks here and parents and police officers and concerned citizens about a subject that I care a great deal about as you could see from the film that was put together by the NEA.

Shortly before the New Hampshire primary in 1992, I was walking in a hotel one night in New York, and some of you may remember, since you helped me, that I was not doing very well then, and my political obituary was being written over and over again. [Laughter] "Will he fall into single digits in New Hampshire, or will he hang on at 11 percent?" And I was feeling pretty sorry for myself. And we were having this big fundraiser in New York, and for all I knew, there wouldn't be three people there. And they took me in the back way, you know, and I walked through the kitchen, totally preoccupied with my own problems.

And all of a sudden this gentleman who was working in the hotel came up to me and said, "Governor, my boy, who is 10, he studies politics in the school, and he says I should vote for you." "So," he says, "I'm going to vote for you." "But" he said, "I want you to do something for me." I said, "What is it?" He said, "I want you to make my boy free."

I said, "Well, what do you mean?" He said, "Well, I came here from another country, and we were very poor there, but at least we were free." He said, "Now we live in a place where we have a park across the street, but my boy can't go to the park unless I go with him to protect him. We have a neighborhood school that's just down the street, but my boy can't go to school unless I walk with him. If my boy is not safe, he is not free. So, if I vote for you as he asks, will you make my boy free?"

And the first thing I felt, frankly, was shame that I was preoccupied with my own problems. And the second thing I thought was, you know, how can we have learning in this country until our children are free?

Now, we're having this huge debate in Washington about what the role of Government ought to be. Yesterday at the American Newspaper Editors Association in Dallas, I had a chance to say where I stood on the issues remaining, both in the Republican contract and in the New Covenant that I ran on in 1992.

We know that we have a lot of economic challenges, that we have to grow the middle class and shrink the under class and make America a good place for a new generation of entrepreneurs. We know that the Government is not well-organized for the information age and it needs to be less bureaucratic and more flexible.

But we also know, I take it, that there are two great obligations that we must, we must pursue as a people, and they are related and they come together here. The first is that we have to enhance the security of our people, not only beyond our borders, but here at home as well. And the second is that we have to empower them all through education to succeed in a world where education, more than ever before, is the key, not only to whether a society succeeds, but whether individuals can live up to their own dreams.

Today, you are coming to talk about both things. You can't succeed in school if you're not secure when you're there, and we can't expect our schools to be safe unless we do more to make our communities safe and our homes safe. So you are dealing with two of the great questions of this time. I applaud you for doing it. This is a very impressive program, and I wish you well.

Last year I fought hard to pass that crime bill because it was comprehensive, because it did have tougher punishment and more prisons, but it also put another 100,000 police on our street in community settings so we could lower crime and make people safer, because it had provisions for making our schools safer, because it had a domestic violence component for violence against women and children.

And the Secretary and I fought very hard for the Safe and Drug Free Schools Act which would provide funds to over 90 percent in our school districts to help to keep the schools safe, whether it would be in the form of security officers or security equipment or other things designed to make our schools safer and more free of drugs.