    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (2000, Book I)]
    [May 3, 2000]
    [Pages 826-828]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at Central High School in Davenport, Iowa
    May 3, 2000

        Hello. I think we should give Barb Hess
    another hand. She did a good job on her speech. [Applause] And your
    principal, Mr. Caudle, give him another
    hand. [Applause] And your great Governor, Governor Tom Vilsack, I'm glad to be here with him. Thank you. I also want to
    thank the Jazz Band and the Marching Band for playing. You did a great
    job today. Thank you very much.
        I am glad to be here. I want to say I appreciated meeting at least
    two of your student leaders, Kelly Witt and
    Ricky Harris--thank them for--
    [applause]. And I want to thank Lieutenant Governor Sally
    Pederson, Attorney General Tom
    Miller, Secretary of Agriculture Patty
    Judge, and the director of education, Ted
    Stilwell, for joining us today. And Mayor
    Yerington, thank you for welcoming us back
    to Davenport. And the other Quad City mayors are here: Mayor
    Leach of Moline; Mayor Ward of East Moline; and Mayor Mark Schwiebert of Rock Island. I think I pronounced that properly,
    and if I didn't, he can reprimand me later. [Laughter]
        I'd like to thank your superintendent, Jim Blanche, for making us welcome here. And since we're here for
    construction purposes, to talk about better school buildings, I'm glad
    to be joined by the president of the Building and Construction Trades
    Union, Mr. Ed Sullivan. So thank you all
    for making me feel welcome.
        I love this community. I came here in late 1992 on a bus with
    Hillary and with Al and Tipper Gore right before our election. Then I
    came back in 1993 after the terrible flood, and I watched you come back
    from that. And today I want to talk about another kind of building.
        I'm in the process of going around the country for 2 days; we just
    left Owensboro, Kentucky. And I want to do two things. I want, first of
    all, to make this trip an opportunity to show America how good the young
    people of our country are, and how much they are learning in our
    schools, and how bright their future is. But the second thing I want to
    do is to point out what challenges are still out there if every young
    person in America is going to have a world-class education.
        And one of the things that we know is that you are not the only
    group of young people in school facilities that are either overcrowded
    or too old or both. And if we want learning to occur, we have got to
    give all of our students the facilities they need.
        Now, this is a beautiful old school. It's even older than the high
    school I went to, which was built in 1917. I've been to the top floor.
    I've seen the physics lab. I went into a biology class. I went
    underneath the bleachers here, in the locker room. I saw where you have
    your meals in the cafeteria, which was built in the '85 extension. And I
    have been given a briefing by your principal
    on how you're going to handle the modernization.
        But what you need to know is there are people all over this country
    who are in situations even more severe. In the city of Philadelphia, the
    average school building is 65 years old. In the city of New York, there
    are still buildings

    [[Page 827]]

    heated in the winter with coal-fired furnaces, where people literally
    shovel coal into them like they did 100 years ago.
        We have school buildings so old they can't be hooked up--they cannot
    be wired to the Internet. The Vice President and I have worked for 6
    years to connect every classroom in America to the Internet. When we
    started, 16 percent of the schools were connected and 3 percent of the
    classrooms. Today, 95 percent of the schools and almost 75 percent of
    the classrooms are connected. But believe it or not, there are some
    which literally can't take a connection. And I saw some of your
    classrooms here today that have severe limits on what can be done in
    terms of electricity provision.
        So what's all this got to do with what we're doing now? Well, when I
    became President, we could never have thought of doing anything for
    school construction or school modernization or repairs because we had a
    big deficit. Today, we're in the midst of our third budget surplus. By
    the end of this year, we will have paid off $355 billion of our national
    debt. And I'm proud of that.
        We are in the midst of the longest economic expansion in history.
    And the big question before the voters this year, and all the adult
    citizens of America that you young people can have an impact on--and
    some of you are old enough to vote now--is what are we going to do with
    our prosperity? So we've got the lowest unemployment rate in 30 years
    and the lowest welfare rolls in 30 years and the lowest female
    unemployment in 40 years and the lowest African-American and Hispanic
    unemployment ever recorded, so what are we going to do with it?
        A lot of times, in free societies, when times are good, people do
    nothing. They just sort of hang around and enjoy it. That would be a
    terrible mistake, because we still have challenges. And one of the
    challenges we have--and every one of you know it's true--education is
    more important than ever before. It's more important to you, and it's
    more important to your country.
        We live in an information economy where what you know and what you
    can learn will determine in large measure the shape of your adult lives
    and the kind of lives you'll be able to give your own children. So one
    of the things that we have to do with our prosperity is to ask
    ourselves--let's take an inventory--where are we not giving our young
    people a world-class education? Why are we not doing it? And what are we
    to do about it?
        Because if we can't do this now, if we can't make uniform excellence
    in education a reality in America now, at this time of historic
    prosperity, we will never get around to it. So we have to do it now.
        One of the things that we ought to do is to make sure that we can
    put all our kids in facilities that are modern enough that they can be
    hooked up to the Internet, that people can learn, that we can do what we
    need to do here, not just the science classes, not just the labs but all
    the classes.
        Let me just give you an example. I just talked to Senator
    Harkin about this before I came in, because he
    got some money for Iowa to do this; the first Federal money ever to help
    in school construction he got on the basis of a pilot project for Iowa.
    And now you heard the Governor say the State's putting money in. But 4
    years ago, when we started to talk about this, the Government said it
    would take $112 billion to modernize schools for all of our kids. Today,
    they say it will take $322 billion.
        The engineers of our country, the people charged with building
    things, a couple of years ago evaluated all of what we call America's
    infrastructure, our roads, our bridges, our railroads, our ports, our
    airports, our water systems. You know what? They said the worst system
    in the world that we had, the worst one in our country, was our school
    buildings, that they are too old and not ready to meet the challenges of
    the 21st century.
        I have been to schools, elementary schools, in Florida--I went to a
    little town in Jupiter, Florida, and went to one elementary school.
    There were 12 housetrailers out behind the school, because the kids were
    so numerous, the school district had grown so much, that they couldn't
    go in there. Even in this school, where you've got a lot of rooms, you
    have a lot more students here than the school was built for. And it's
    one of the things the teachers talked to me about today.
        So, why am I here? Because I hope that America will see this problem
    and this opportunity through you and your school, thanks to our friends
    in the media, and because I have given the Congress now for one more
    year my proposal, which basically would say: One of the things we ought
    to do with our prosperity is to help build or massively overhaul 6,000

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    schools, and we ought to give the States enough money to repair another
    5,000 schools every single year for the next 5 years. The students of
    this country and their families deserve it.
        Back in 1907 this high school was called, I quote, ``a high school
    for the future.'' Back then the population of Davenport was 39,000,
    about a third of what it is today, and Central High had half the number
    of students it does now. It was a high school for the future. You have
    some new renovations planned over the next 2 years, which I hope will
    make it a high school for the future again. But I want every single
    school in America to be a school of the future. You need it. You deserve
    it. And if the Congress will pass my proposal, we will help you get it.
        Thank you, and God bless you.

     Note:  The President spoke at 6:27 p.m. in the auditorium. In his
    remarks, he referred to teacher Barbara Hess, who introduced the
    President, principal Henry L. Caudle, student body president Kelly L.
    Witt, and senior class president Frederick L. (Ricky) Harris III,
    Central High School; Gov. Tom Vilsack and Lt. Gov. Sally Pederson of
    Iowa; Mayor Philip Yerington of Davenport, IA; Mayor Stanley F. Leach of
    Moline, IL; Mayor Bill Ward of East Moline, IL; Mayor Mark W. Schwiebert
    of Rock Island, IL; and Jim Blanche, superintendent, Davenport School
    District.