Remarks at the Safe and Drug-Free Schools Recognition Program

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, June 12, 1995

June 7, 1995

Jaime, I think I can speak for every adult in this audience today and say that there's not a person here who wouldn't be proud to be your parent when you graduate from high school tomorrow. Thank you, and God bless you for everything you've done. Thank you, Marilyn, for being here. Thank you, Director Brown. And thank you, Secretary Riley.

Ladies and gentlemen, the statement you just heard from this fine young women, about to begin her life after high school, is as clear an example as I could ever think of, of what I think we ought to be doing as a country. You hear all these debates up here in Washington about whether the government should do this, that, or the other thing, whether our problems are fundamentally to be addressed by political action, or whether all of our problems are just cultural and if people would just simply take responsibility for themselves and do the right thing we wouldn't have any problems, and therefore, we should just ignore any spending call--nothing is really worth investing in, let's just make everybody do the right thing.

The truth is, in the real world we need to do both things. Parents have to set better examples; they have to teach their children. We need to tell young people at the earliest possible age, "There comes a time in life when you cannot blame other people for your own problems, and whatever your difficulties are, you have to behave and you have to take control of your own lives." But it's also true that, in the meanwhile, somebody has to pay to protect these children if they need protection, to be safe in school, and somebody has to make provision to bring people into the schools who can do the kinds of things that Jaime talked about, who can be the role models, who can talk about how to diffuse conflict, who can talk about how to avoid violence, who can talk about the imperative of staying off of drugs, which is still, I would remind you, at the root of more than half of the problems that we're dealing with in this country today.

So this is one more time a phony, overly politicized debate here. It's not either/or; it is both. And we have responsibilities here, those of us who work here, to make sure that every single child in America has a chance to get out of school safe and educated and be the kind of person that was reflected in what Jaime said here today. We have a partnership obligation to do that for America.

That is at the heart of a lot of arguments we're having here in Washington. Last night I received Congress's rescission bill. The rescission bill cuts spending from this year's budget. I believe we ought to do that and make another down payment on balancing our budget. I've done everything I could to cut this deficit. In 1993, unfortunately, with only Democrats voting for it, we voted for a deficit-reduction program and passed it and I signed it, which reduced the deficit over the 7 year period now popularly discussed by $1 trillion. I believe in cutting the deficit.

We froze discretionary spending completely, which means every time we gave more money to education, we had to cut something else. And we did it gladly. We cut waste and duplication and bureaucracy and committed to reduce the size of the Federal Government by 270,000 people. But we increased investment in Head Start. We made college loans more available, more affordable. We supported schools with the Goals 2000 programs, which were not mandates from the Federal Government, but were programs like the safe and drug free school program, where we give money to local school districts and they decide how you can make the school safest, how you can make the schools the most drug free, just the approach the leadership of this new Congress says they favor, let people at the local level make more of their decisions. But we thought we ought to be partners because not every local school district had the money to guarantee safety and the best possible efforts to make children safe, to make them learn how to avoid violence and to stay drug free.

Now, after all this, I can tell you that the budget today would be in balance--today--but for the interest we'll have to pay this year on the debt that was run in the 12 years before I became President. That is the problem. We took leave of our collective financial senses about a dozen years ago and began to put this country in the ditch. And we've got to take it out. But we cannot do it overnight. And we must recognize that the only deficit in this country is not the budget deficit, there's a deficit in this country in the number of drug-free children. There's a deficit in this country in the number of safe schools. There's an education deficit in this country. And we dare not ignore those problems. We can do both. That's the right way to approach this problem.

I worked in good faith with Members of the Congress to craft a rescission bill that would cut spending by a set amount and do it in the right way. I actually agreed with the spending cuts passed by the United States Senate with a bipartisan majority, an overwhelming bipartisan majority, because it protected programs like the drug-free school program, the national service program, the education programs that we're working so hard on. Unfortunately, what happened is after the Senate passed the bill, they went into a closed-door conference with Members of the House who had passed a bill that did cut all these things, and instead of cutting more spending, they took out a lot of education investment. They took out half the drug-free school money and substituted courthouses, highways, and city streets in selected States and congressional districts. In other words, they decided to cut school safety to increase pork.