[Congressional Record Volume 148, Number 147 (Thursday, November 14, 2002)]
[Senate]
[Pages S11085-S11086]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

      By Ms. LANDRIEU:
  S. 3169. A bill to provide for military charters between military 
installations and local school districts, to provide credit enhancement 
initiatives to promote military charter school facility acquisition, 
construction, and renovation, and for other purposed; to the committee 
on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions.
  Ms. LANDRIEU. Mr. President, I rise to offer a bill which addresses a 
growing population who seek a distinct supportive voice: our military 
dependent children.
  Education is an issue which many Senators on both sides of the aisle 
have worked very hard to improve in every State in our union. This 
bill, however, is unique in that it strives to increase the quality of 
education for hundreds of thousands of our children of members of the 
Armed Services by catering to their specific needs and frequent moves.
  Let me begin by expressing my thanks to most members of this body for 
always working diligently to introduce and pass great initiatives for 
education. I firmly believe that we, at this juncture in our Nation's 
great history, have continued to bring family issues, such as education 
and the economy to the forefront of our discussion. Further, amid our 
continued discussion of the possibility of sending our military men and 
women into harm's way in Iraq, there is no better time to concentrate 
on their children, children who have the added burden of worrying about 
a deployed parent, or who must move to a new school many times as their 
parent or parents move to new assignments around the country.
  This bill, I am proposing, will provide Stable Transitions I 
Education for our Active Duty Youth. It is called the STEADY Act and is 
the first step to a smoother educational career for military dependent 
children.
  When I last spoke of this bill, I said that we in ``Congress are 
becoming wiser and wiser on the issue of education'' by recognizing 
that our future and our economy depend on the education of our 
children.
  It truly is an issue of strengthening our Nation. We cannot have an 
economically strong and militarily secure Nation moving in a 
progressive way without an excellent school system. No matter where a 
child is born, rural or urban, on the east coast or west coast, if we 
do not do a better job as a Nation of giving our children a quality 
education, the future of our Nation will not be as bright, and it could 
put us in jeopardy.
  I also make the argument that for our military, the same holds true. 
it is not just about providing our military with the most extraordinary 
weapons. it is not just about training our military men and women tot 
he highest levels. It is not just providing them the basics.
  We have an obligation to recognize that when our men and women sign 
up to be in our military, they have willingly made sacrifices, but 
their families' quality of life should not be one of those sacrifices. 
We need to provide them, between the Department of Defense and the 
Department of Education, a quality education for their children.
  When we send our soldiers into battle, we want them focused on the 
battle and mission at hand. We do not want them worried, as they 
naturally would be, about spouses and dependents at home, about their 
happiness, about their comfort, about their security. It makes our 
military stronger when we provide good, quality-of-life initiatives for 
their families at home. One of the ways we can do that is by improving 
the schools for military dependents. There are over 800,000 children 
who are military dependents out of an overall force strength of 1.4 
million adults connected to the military. Many of them are school-age 
children. Because of the specific demands of our military, which are 
very unlike the civilian sector, many move every 2 years. Some military 
members move from the east coast to the west coast, moving families 
with them. it is very difficult providing an excellent education 
generally, and yet the military has even more challenges.
  What is the solution? I offer this bill to strengthen our military 
schools in the United States in a creative way. This bill will set up 
the a pilot program to help create military charter schools around the 
Nation in partnership with local public school systems to provide an 
opportunity not only for our military dependents, but this framework 
will also help communities who have a large military presence. The 
benefit overall is that the community gets a better school, a school 
that has the opportunity to provide an excellent education, while being 
extremely flexible to accommodate the unique needs of a military 
dependent student.
  The second benefit is that it gives children whose families might not 
have any connection to the military, an introduction into who military 
people and what military life can be like.

  This is a partnership. It is a pilot program that will help establish 
charter schools, will give important consideration to military children 
as they move from community to community, and will create for the first 
time what we call an academic passport.
  An academic passport will help to stabilize and standardize the 
curriculum without micromanaging, without dictating what the curriculum 
should be. It sets up a new approach or a new framework for our local 
elementary and secondary schools throughout the country to set up a 
standardized curriculum to address the vast peaks and valleys 
encountered by military dependent students as they move from one 
district to another. To illustrate: one school district might require 3 
years of a foreign language or 2 years of algebra or 1 year of algebra, 
or a whole different curriculum. That is part of this bill. It is 
something about which military families feel very strongly. I hope that 
with this new pilot program to help create charter schools with a new 
academic passport, we can begin to focus some of our resources, again, 
not all within the Department of Defense; some of this is within the 
jurisdiction of the Department of Education, to create something 
exciting and wonderful for these 800,000 children.
  Madam President, 600,000 of these children are in public schools 
today, at

[[Page S11086]]

great stress to those public districts; 100,000 of these children are 
either in private schools or are home schooled; and only 32,000 of the 
800,000 are in Department of Defense schools. These schools are 
concentrated in a few States. There are only 32,000 children, as I 
said, of 800,000 dependents in DDESS schools in New York, Kentucky, 
Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama.
  As my colleagues can see, dependent children of military personnel 
are in public schools throughout the country. Sometimes they are good 
public schools; sometimes they are not so good. We are working hard to 
make every public school excellent, but I think we have a special 
obligation to our military families to make sure that those children, 
with the added burdens they face, are getting an excellent education.
  If you look at the general population, non-officers in our military, 
91.5 percent have a high school degree or GED, 91 percent. In our 
general population, it is about 80 percent. This is a very upwardly 
mobile group of Americans. Theses are men and women with great 
discipline, great patriotism, great commitment to the Nation. 
Obviously, they are serving their country, but they are committed to 
their families, their communities, and their education.
  As one can see, the officers exceed the general population at large. 
Almost 40 percent have advanced degrees; 99 percent or more have 
bachelor degrees. This is also a very upwardly mobile population. If we 
can provide excellent schools and opportunities for the children of 
this 91 percent, I think we will be doing a very good job in helping to 
strengthen our military but also helping our country be a better place. 
It is truly something on which we should focus more.
  In conclusion, let me tell you of a school of which I am very proud. 
It might be one of the first military charters, if not the first, in 
the Nation. This is a school which opened in September and is an even 
larger success than we anticipated. This is a state-of-the-art, brand 
new charter school in Plaquemines Parish, which serves the military and 
civilian community there. It has alleviated a huge burden on the local 
school district, and is ready for its first expansion.
  I think we can work all day long on pay raises, on building more 
ships, on buying more tanks, and on building a stronger Air Force, but 
truly I think focusing on educational opportunities for military 
dependent children, will help us build morale, help us improve 
retention, will help us strengthen our military in the intermediate and 
the long term, and it is something that, with a little creativity, a 
little bit of thinking outside of the box, I am convinced we could 
finance the construction of these schools through means laid out in the 
bill, and end up coming out with some excellent facilities around this 
Nation to serve both our military and our nonmilitary families and do a 
great job for our Defense Department and a great job for our country. 
That is what this bill would accomplish: again, it sets up a pilot 
program to establish military charter schools in the neediest areas of 
the Nation. I would hope that it would be met with enthusiasm from my 
colleagues who consistently support good education initiatives, and 
from all of us who know the value of military service to our great 
Nation.
  ``Every few years you make new friends, Then you're gone. You do it 
all the time. I keep in touch. My best friend and I email, and write 
back and forth.''--Military dependent student.
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