Remarks at Miami-Dade Community College in Miami, Florida

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Oct 28, 1996

We have taken more chemical pollutants out of the air. We have made our drinking water safer. We have raised the standards for food. We have done more to protect national parks and to expand national parks. We have begun the work, but not finished the work, of protecting the Everglades.

You will decide. You will decide whether we will keep up this work and finish the job on the Everglades. You will decide whether we will clean up 500 more toxic waste dumps because there are still 10 million American children growing up within 4 miles of a toxic waste site. That is wrong. I want them growing up next to parks, not poison. You will decide. Will you help us do that? [Applause]

But most important of all, you will decide whether we build an America in which we have a world-class education system open to all Americans. I have worked hard, from expanding opportunities for Head Start, to giving our schools more tools for the kids to meet higher standards, to creating the national service program, AmeriCorps - some of the people are here - that have allowed people to work in their communities and earn their way to college, to the biggest increase in Pell grants in 20 years, to the direct student loan program.

And thank you, President Padron, and others for supporting that. We are saving the average college student on the direct loan program about $200 a year. But more important, we're saying to every student who borrows money in that way, you don't have to worry about your college loans anymore because you can pay it back as a percentage of your income. No one can ever make you go bankrupt because you borrowed the money to go to college. That is a good thing.

Every step along the way, we had to fight our opponents on the other side. They tried to kill the student loan program improvements. They tried to cut back on Head Start. They tried to kill the national service program. Now they even have promised to eliminate the Department of Education.

Audience members. Boo-o-o!

The President. Your vote will decide, and whether you vote will decide. That's their program: go into the 21st century with not a single soul in the President's Cabinet speaking for the education of our children. Is that the future you want?

Audience members. No-o-o!

The President. Well, you have another alternative. Jerry talked about it, but I want to say again, I want to emphasize four things to you that I want to do in education, all important to Florida.

Number one, 40 percent of the 8-year-olds in America cannot read a book on their own today. Part of that is because we're a nation of immigrants, we have a lot of young kids whose first language is not English. But everyone needs to be able to read in order to keep learning. I want to mobilize 30,000 people, the AmeriCorps volunteers, trained reading tutors, and others, to get a million volunteers across America to go into the schools, to work with the parents so that in 4 years we can say every 8-year-old in America can pick up a book and say, "I can read this all by myself."