[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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