Remarks during a roundtable discussion on education in Herndon

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Sept 7, 1998

The President. Let me just say very briefly before I move on, you probably know this because you talked about how your school was growing. But I believe, Secretary Riley, I think it was last year was the first year that we actually had a school class from kindergarten through high school bigger than the baby boom generation. And this explosion of children into our schools has created enormous strains on school districts all across America.

I was in a school in Florida. I believe it had 17 trailers outside.

Fairfax County Superintendent of Schools Daniel A. Domenech. We have that beat, Mr. President. [Laughter]

The President. This was just one school, not a school district, and it was amazing. But there was an article in The Washington Post and in other newspapers over the weekend about the teacher shortage in America, and I'm very concerned about it. We have two proposals: One is to put 35,000 teachers in the most difficult and underserved areas in the country - it's part of our budget - the other would put 100,000 teachers out there across the country in the first 3 grades, to try to keep class size down below 20. And I think those things are very, very important.

One of the things I'm hoping I can do is to persuade the Congress in the next month to embrace the idea that we clearly have a national obligation now to support what is a national phenomenon, the explosion of the number of schoolchildren in our schools. So when you say what it did, it made me want to think about that.

I'd like to go on now to JoAnn Shackelford, because it seems to be a logical followup to what you said about the diversity of your student body and teaching people to read and this Saturday Program, which I'm very interested in. It sounds to me like something everybody ought to be doing.

Ms. Shackelford. Thank you. First of all, I wanted to tell you, welcome to our school. We're so excited you're here. Miss Freeman is a hard act to follow, so I won't try. But I do have a few things to ask for. [Laughter]

The President. Who picked this questioner? [Laughter]

[At this point, Ms. Shackelford, a reading specialist, expressed the faculty's conviction that students can learn to read by the third grade and described the Reading Recovery program, which involves additional teachers working with the classroom teachers to help children with special needs, and the Excel Saturday program, which consists of high school student and teacher volunteers tutoring elementary school children on Saturdays. Ms. Shackelford expressed the need for more funding to expand the programs' outreach and suggested scholarships for high school tutors.]

The President. I'd just like to make a couple of observations. First of all, I'll think about this high school scholarship thing. The only high school scholarships directly for service, community service, we have are the ones that I announced at Penn State a couple of years ago, where we give a modest scholarship that's matched in the local community to one person for outstanding community service in high school.

So we now have 1,000 colleges and universities providing reading volunteers through the America Reads program to go into schools to help young children learn to read, and most of them are work study students. But a lot of them are not eligible for work study, and they just do it anyway. There may be something we can do on that, and I'll think about it.

The other thing I'd say is that I'm a big fan of the Reading Recovery program. And if you look at the research, it has about the best long-term results of any strategy. But there is a reason for it. It's very expensive, because it's so labor intensive. And it's something that maybe Secretary Riley wants to talk about this a little bit.

We've discussed before that whether the generalized assistance we give to school districts for supportive programs like this, or the States, which then the school districts get, should be more focused. And we've tried not to sort of pick and choose among the various reading strategies because of the limited amount of money and the large number of programs underway in the country.

But there's no question that the Reading Recovery strategy, particularly when you've got a lot of young people whose first language is not English, have had, I believe, the best long-term results, but it's because it's so labor intensive and is quite expensive and it's something we need to look at.

Dick, you want to say anything about this?

[Secretary of Education Richard W. Riley agreed with the President and praised the Reading Recovery program's contribution to national education goals.]

The President. Maybe we should go on now to, since we're talking about this subject, to Maria Gorski, who is a parent liaison. And you talked about involving the parents, so talk a little about that for us, Maria.

[Maria Gorski, liaison to parents of Spanish-speaking immigrant students, welcomed the President and expressed concern that many parents have difficulty helping their children with homework because of language barriers and lack of time. She asked the President to support the United Neighborhood program run by the Herndon Police Department, which offers tutoring by volunteers in the evenings.]