[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 109 (Tuesday, August 9, 1994)]
[Senate]
[Page S]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: August 9, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                             TRIO PROGRAMS

  Mr. SIMON. Madam President, I rise to join my colleagues in 
supporting the fiscal year 1995 Labor, HHS, and Education 
appropriations bill. That bill includes a substantial and deserved 11 
percent increase for the TRIO Programs in the amount of $44 million. 
Recently, the July 25, 1994, USA Today carried an excellent article on 
the TRIO programs. The front page story highlighted the stellar 
academic and professional career of West Virginia's Secretary of 
Education and Arts, Barbara Harmon-Schamberger. I had the pleasure of 
meeting Ms. Schamberger--while I served as chairman of the Education 
and Labor Subcommittee on Postsecondary Education in the other body--
and she testified in support of the TRIO Programs. Ms. Schamberger is a 
graduate of the University of West Virginia, which I might note is in 
the home State of the distinguished chairman of the Committee on 
Appropriations. She is also a Rhodes scholar, studied at Oxford, and 
holds the J.D. degree from the University of Virginia.
  While those of us who have consistently supported the TRIO Programs 
would not claim that all of its participants have achieved at the same 
level of Ms. Schamberger, the record is clear that this program lifts 
the lives of its participants and motivates them to achieve far beyond 
the ordinary level of expectation. If they had not been involved in one 
of the several TRIO Programs, their lives would not have been enhanced 
socially, academically, and professionally.
  I was pleased to have had a major role in establishing what we now 
refer to as the Ronald McNair Post-baccalaureate Achievement Program 
during the 1986 reauthorization of the Higher Education Act. My 
distinguished colleagues from South Carolina, the senior Senator [Mr. 
Thurmond] who took the lead in renaming the program in 1987, and my 
friend and colleague, the junior Senator from South Carolina [Mr. 
Hollings] who has been the primary advocate for increased TRIO funding, 
deserve much of the credit for making the Federal Government's 
commitment to equal opportunity real in the lives of young people. We 
could do more and we can do more. In fact, we must do more if we are to 
make the American Dream real in the lives of low-income minority, 
handicapped, and first generation students who will not benefit from a 
college education unless we provide the Pell grant funding and 
adequately fund programs ranging from Head Start to the Ronald McNair 
Post-baccalaureate Achievement Program to ensure academic access and 
success.
  I hope that my colleagues have already read the July 25, 1994, USA 
Today article by Tamara Henry, but if not, I encourage each of you to 
do so.
  Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the article be printed 
in the Congressional Record at this point.
  There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                    [From USA Today, July 25, 1994]

                       Up, Up and Out of Poverty

                           (By Tamara Henry)

       Just before giving up on high school, Barbara Harmon 
     decided to try the antipoverty program Upward Bound.
       The incentives were right: three square meals a day; a $20-
     a-month stipend that could stretch her mother's welfare 
     check; and a dormitory room during the summers with running 
     water and electricity. She'd be nuts to say no, even though 
     college was the furthest thing from her mind.
       Today, Barbara Harmon-Schamberger, 31, has a law degree and 
     is West Virginia's secretary of education and the arts, 
     appointed to the post by Gov. Gaston Caperton.
       ``There had always been people in my life who helped me,'' 
     she says, ``but (Upward Bound) was the first institution to 
     support me. I guess it gave me human worth.''
       Upward Bound provides high school students academic 
     tutoring on college campuses after school, on Saturdays and 
     during the summer. It is known popularly as one of the TRIO 
     programs because of its siblings: Student Support Services, 
     located on college campuses to counsel and tutor needy 
     students, and Talent Search, which motivates middle-school 
     students with counseling and information on college 
     admissions requirements, scholarships and student financial 
     aid. There are now two other programs in the group.
       ``One of the ironies is that the students we are serving 
     are just Head Start students on the other end,'' says Arnold 
     Mitchem, head of the National Council of Educational 
     Opportunity Associations, which oversees TRIO.
       Unlike Head Start, the popular federal preschool program, 
     TRIO's support has been uneven over the years. Congress now 
     is debating whether to boost its budget by $44 million.
       Mitchem says disparities in higher education based on 
     family incomes were greater in 1991 than they have been in 
     the past 22 years. In fact, Americans between the ages of 18 
     and 24 in families earning under $22,000 have less than a 4% 
     chance of earning a college degree; under $39,000, less than 
     15%, and under $62,000, less than 25%. The median family 
     income in 1991 was $38,268.
       ``I've given my whole professional life to trying to 
     mitigate against what I feel is some sort of economic 
     injustice,'' Mitchem says. ``Essentially what we are doing is 
     trying to provide the kinds of insights, information and 
     encouragement, motivation and academic preparation that 
     middle-income youngsters receive.''
       Harmon-Schamberger (she took her stepfather's name when her 
     mother remarried) felt grim about her future.
       ``Nobody but my mother believed in me,'' she says. ``I 
     wasn't supposed to do anything. I was supposed to be on 
     welfare and get pregnant and drop out of school.''
       Born in Columbus, Ohio, to a black father and white mother, 
     she spent part of her childhood in Sacramento. When her 
     parents divorced, she and her mother went on welfare.
       ``We just kept sliding down the economic scale. We wound up 
     in West Virginia in a house with no running water and 
     eventually in a house with no running water or electricity.''
       Besides the economic problems, she had trouble being the 
     only minority in Doddridge County, W.Va. At age 16, she had 
     missed much of school because of illness and failed her 
     junior year.
       ``I said I'm out of here. I don't need this. I don't have 
     to put up with this. I'm going to get a job'' at the local 
     glass factory, she told her counselor.
       The counselor talked her into joining Upward Bound, ``using 
     words like college prep.'' Living in dormitories at what was 
     then Salem College in West Virginia sounded like living in a 
     foreign country. She was skeptical at first.
       ``I asked. `Do they have air conditioning?'
       ```Yeah,' he said.
       ```Do they have running water?'
       ```Of course.'
       ```Do I get my own bed?'
       ```Yes. And there is food and ice cream and things like 
     that. And there's a $20 stipend.'
       ``That was the big incentive,'' says Harmon-Schamberger. 
     ``We couldn't always afford toilet paper--$20. This will do 
     it. I knew Mama could use the money so I agreed to go.''
       Tutoring by Upward Bound counselors helped her with 
     dyslexia and other learning disabilities.
       ``They took me places and fed me and made me think that I 
     could do something,'' says Harmon-Schamberger, whose high ACT 
     scores helped get her accepted at West Virginia University.
       When a counselor teased that she would one day be the 
     state's first female Rhodes Scholar, she asked, ``What's a 
     Rhodes Scholar? Is it near Harvard?'' Her self-esteem was so 
     low, ``I thought she was crazy because I didn't get a date to 
     the prom.''
       A 1981 study by the Research Triangle Institute in Durham, 
     N.C., found that Upward Bound students were four times more 
     like to graduate from colleage than poor students not in the 
     program. Also, it said that students who were counseled or 
     tutored were 2.6 times more likely to stay in school.
       ``Not everybody in my Upward Bound program went to 
     college,'' says Harmon-Schamberger. Even so, its program 
     ``prevents students from falling through the cracks.''
       Harmon-Schamberger graduated cum laude from WVU with two 
     bachelor's degrees in four majors--history, English, 
     political science and international studies--and did become 
     the state's first women Rhodes Scholar. After studying at 
     Oxford University, she returned to earn a law degree at the 
     University of Virginia in 1991.
       Before taking the state position, Harmon-Schamberger worked 
     in the Washington, D.C., law office of Milbank, Tweed, Hadley 
     and McCloy. She remembers earning in two weeks what her 
     mother received in a year on welfare.
       TRIO currently serves more than 800,000 Americans from 
     families with incomes under $24,000 in which neither parent 
     graduated from college. Forty-two percent of the students are 
     white, 35% black, 15% Hispanic, 4% Native American and 4% 
     Asian; 16,000 have disabilities. TRIO programs now are 
     offered at more than 1,000 colleges and universities and at 
     100 community agencies.
       By TRIO's 30th anniversary next June, Mitchem estimates 
     more than 10.5 million students will have been served on a 
     federal investment totaling $3 billion.
       TRIO struggled through turbulent times during the Reagan 
     and Bush administrations.
       The programs now are getting attention again. President 
     Clinton has recommended a 4.3% increase in TRIO's $418 
     million 1994 budget. The House approved an even higher 
     increase--11%--that a Senate Appropriations subcommittee also 
     agreed to last week.
       Mitchem estimates the funding increase would ``give 63,000 
     people from 11 to 27 years of age a realistic chance at 
     academic success.''
       ``The extraordinary thing about Upward Bound is that you 
     wind up being a success even if you don't go the full 
     distance,'' says Harmon-Schamberger, who now lives in the 
     rural West Virginia town of Clendenin, where she cares for 
     her ailing mother and four dogs.
       ``You don't wind up where your parents did. It moves you 
     along, some way, some how.
       ``It moves you from abject poverty to that middle-class 
     threshold somehow.''

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