[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 85 (Thursday, June 23, 2005)]
[House]
[Pages H5083-H5084]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                             GEAR UP FACTS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Souder) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Speaker, pretty much everybody tonight has been upset 
about something, and often when I come to the floor, I am too. But I 
wanted to share some good news, actually some good news inside the 
Labor-HHS appropriations bill, which is very tight in funding, and it 
involves the GEAR UP program, which I believe is a very important 
program, and, in fact, the President has proposed to zero it out and 
the Committee on Appropriations had put $306 million, the same funding 
as fiscal year 2005, in this.
  It is a program that, from the first time we funded it in 1999, had 
only $120 million in it after we finally got it appropriated; and now 
it is up to $306 million in spite of a very tight budget.
  I would like to give just a brief history of this program. The 
gentleman from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (Mr. Fattah), when I was 
first elected in the class of 1994, came to me with this proposal of 
how to reach minority and low-income kids and give them some hope that 
someday they might be able to get student loans and someday might be 
able to get scholarships and aid, because it is one thing for a middle

[[Page H5084]]

class or upper class suburban family where somewhere between prenatal 
care and child care the parents are already getting their college 
catalogues out and trying to encourage them to go to college versus 
many families where they have never had anybody go to college, where 
they do not really feel there is going to be a chance.
  And sometimes in Head Start and elementary school, when we go visit, 
we see the bright hopes in these kids' eyes and they want to be this 
and they want to be that, but somewhere around junior high they start 
to lose these hopes. That is why the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. 
Fattah) originally called this program High Hopes, because at eighth 
grade we now have a program that moves on through the high school years 
and the bulk of these dollars, half of it, go roughly to scholarships 
and half of it to help go into the schools to provide financial advice, 
to provide support, to basically tell these kids that if they keep a 
2.0 grade average, and depending upon the State's program in Indiana 
where they have some other supplemental things, that they will 
guarantee them to get into a State university with financial aid, that 
they will be eligible for scholarship aid but will be guaranteed 
financial aid, that they will be worked through with this financial 
aid, that they will continue to receive some support.
  And I believe that this program was a very critical program that, as 
we first moved it through committee, it was clear that we were very 
close in the votes. And with the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Upton) 
and then Congressman McIntosh and me, it wound up to be a tie vote, and 
Joe Scarborough, who is now on TV, cast the deciding vote, which caused 
quite a bit of uproar on our side, but we got it authorized. Then it 
moved through the appropriations process where we continued to move 
that, and by that time President Clinton adopted the program and 
changed the name to GEAR UP and helped push this program.

                              {time}  1845

  In fact, one of my more difficult moments was when we went to the 
signing ceremony, and then Congressman Lindsey Graham and I went to the 
ceremony, and our goal was particularly not to be in the picture with 
President Clinton. As a conservative Republican, it could have been the 
death of me politically. But we went to the White House, and when I 
left I made it through without a picture, and when I turned around, 
there was the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Fattah) and he said, 
somebody wants to talk to you, and the whole press corps was there, and 
there is President Clinton. He starts talking to me about this program 
and thanking me for my help, with the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. 
Fattah) on this program. The bottom line was, I thought my career was 
going to be over.
  But, secondly, it showed that you can do things in a bipartisan way. 
What I saw in the President's eyes was a commitment to these kids. What 
we have seen is the dangers of a lot of these programs, is when the 
Presidency changes the program gets abandoned.
  Mr. Speaker, we have continued and expanded this program, even under 
a Republican administration, in a bipartisan way. At a time when we are 
divided on so many different issues, to be able to take an education 
program that is targeted for low-income kids across this country and 
continue to fund this is a tremendous credit, first to the gentleman 
from Pennsylvania (Mr. Fattah) and his committed leadership, to the 
gentleman from Ohio (Chairman Regula) in continuing to fund this, and 
it is a credit to this House that we at least have this program in 
place, supplemented with TRIO programs and other things, where we can 
tell young people in America that we can help provide some assistance 
to them and that, indeed, while you may not get exactly equal chances 
to everybody else, we are going to give you an opportunity in America, 
and we are going to give at least some assistance so you too can have 
some hope in this country.
  And if we are going to compete worldwide, as Thomas Friedman in his 
great book says about the flattening of the earth, we have to have 
everybody in this country understand that if we are going to compete, 
we have to succeed. So it is important that we have some programs to 
supplement the family support system and the lack of some of the 
educational history in these high-risk families. Because they too have 
to get up to much higher competitive standards, and we have not been 
able to do this, and the GEAR UP program is one small step in that 
direction.
  Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the subcommittee and the full committee 
and the United States Senate for continuing to fund the GEAR UP 
program.

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