Remarks on the first anniversary of the School-to-Work Opportunities Act of 1994 in White Plains, Maryland

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, May 22, 1995

Well, Nancy, you may not be famous yet, but you're a lot more famous than you were 5 minutes [Laughter] I wish I had thought of that Michael Jordan line. I'd throw the whole speech away. [Laughter]

I want to thank Nancy and Lorrie and the other students who showed me around this fine place and showed me what they do here. I thank you for that. I thank Secretary Reich and Secretary Riley for the work they have done to put this school-to-work partnership together with the Education Department and the Labor Department. I thank Senator Kennedy for his sponsorship of this legislation and your Congressman, Steny Hoyer, for the work he did to pass it. I'm glad to see Mr. Pastillo here, and I thank him and all those who have worked so hard on this. I'll never forget the conversation I had with the Ford CEO, Alex Trotman, about this issue in the White House not all that long ago, in urging more corporate involvement in business sponsorship of the school-to-work concept. President Sine, I thank you for being here and for the work that all the community education institutions in America are doing to help prepare young Americans to succeed in the global economy. They may be the most important institutions in the United States today, and I thank you for that. I want to thank all the State and local officials from Maryland who are here, Lt. Governor Kathleen Kennedy Townsend and Senator Miller, I'm glad to see you. And I know that, Governor McKernan, you shouldn't feel alone, there are lots of Republicans here today - [laughter] - county commissioners, members of the House of Delegates, county officials here, the Sheriff and others.

This ought not to be a partisan issue. And I thank you, sir, for your leadership. He wrote a fine book about it, which Mr. Pastillo referenced in his introduction. And Governor McKernan sent me a copy of it, autographed it, and I read it. And I thought if my dear mother were still living, she would wonder which of us were more successful, because she always thought whether you wrote books or not was a real standard of whether you'd done anything in life. [Laughter] So according to my mother's life, you've done something very important. And we are very grateful to you, sir, for the leadership you have given this movement all across America. The United States needs desperately for every young person in this country to have the opportunity that these young people have had. And thanks to you and your efforts, more will have that chance. I thank you.

I would also like to thank our host here, Automated Graphics. Thank you very much for having us here. We are grateful, and we appreciate it.

I want to say a little about this in a larger context. What we are doing here today to celebrate the one-year anniversary of the school-to-work program is really adapting to the information age in the 21st century, one of the oldest traditions in the United States. Just imagine, for example - here we are in Maryland - what if we were here 200 years ago? You would be a young person living in a settlement in Maryland called Port Tobacco, which was then a big town around these parts. You'd be in a promising new country. George Washington would be your President. John Adams would be your Vice President. Pretty good lineup. [Laughter] And everybody would be optimistic. And most people would be like Nancy, they'd get up at 5 a.m. or 5:30 a.m. every morning and go to work. If you wanted a better job, you'd probably leave the country and come into town, where you would walk down a main street, and you would look at the people who were working. Two hundred years ago, you'd see a blacksmith, a carpenter and, of course, a printer. If you wanted to learn how to do those jobs, you'd simply knock on one of the doors and hope that in return for hard work, you could get a craftsman to teach you those skills. That's the way it was done 200 years ago.

And for a long time, that's the way it was done, as one generation kept faith with the next. Well, we know that we can't exactly do it that way anymore, but if you think about it, that's what the school-to-work program is all about in modern terms for the modern economy. And it's very, very important.

This year, we are seeing grants that involve over 100,000 students nationwide, over 40,000 employers, including very large and very powerful employers in this country but also some very, very small ones. And there are over 2,500 schools all across America involved in this program. The act was a genuine partnership; it set up no bureaucracy whatever. It simply made grants to local partnerships, many of them in poor areas, and gave students the chance to show what their hard work could do.

This year, we are doubling the school-to-work funding for the eight pioneer States that already have programs. Seed grants will go out to 20 new States so that all 50 States will have some participation in the school-to-work program. By 1997, every State in America will have a school-to-work program up and running.