    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (2000, Book I)]
    [February 2, 2000]
    [Pages 169-174]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at Frank W. Ballou Senior High School
    February 2, 2000

        Thank you. Now, all of you sitting out here in this audience, you
    know, some of us speak in public for a living; others don't. I thought
    Darnell was terrific. Didn't you think he did
    a good job?
        I am so glad to be here today with all of you at Ballou Senior High
    School. I thank the band for playing for us earlier today. I thought you
    all did a great job. And I thank Dr. Durham and
    Dr. Bridges for welcoming me here and for giving
    me a track-and-field jacket, which I will wear happily. I thank the
    students who met me.
        I want to say a special word of thanks to the chairman and CEO of
    America Online, Steve Case, and for Epic
    Learning's president, David Stirling. I thank
    them for what they said here today and for the commitment they have to
    giving you and young people like you all over this country a chance to
    live your dreams by making sure you have access to the technological
    future that ought to be within reach of every American. They don't have
    to do this; they're doing this because they know it is the right thing
    to do. And I thank them for being here.
        I want to talk a little today about what our job is in the
    Government, what my job as President is, what Washington's job should be
    to make sure that we can have more stories like the ones I saw from the
    students today that Darnell introduced me to.
    And I want to thank all the students that showed me what they were doing
    to either repair or to work with computers. But nothing that the
    President proposes that costs any money can be done unless the Congress
    goes along. And there is an enormous amount of interest in the United
    States Congress today in both parties, in both the Senate and the House,
    to do something about this.
        And there is a big delegation from Congress here, so I want to
    introduce them. I'd like to ask them to stand, and I hope you will
    express your appreciation to them: First of all, Senator Bob
    Bennett, from Utah, who headed our Y2K
    efforts in Congress--thank you, sir; Congresswoman Maxine
    Waters, from California; Congresswoman Sheila
    Jackson Lee, from Texas; Congressman Bill
    Jefferson, from Louisiana; Congressman
    Adam Smith, from Washington; Congresswoman Ellen
    Tauscher, from California; Congressman
    David Wu, from Oregon; and your Representative in
    Congress, Eleanor Holmes Norton. Thank
    you. [Applause]

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        Did I miss anybody? And I want to thank your wonderful
    Mayor, who was once a member of our
    administration, Mayor Anthony Williams. Stand up, there. Thank you very
    much. [Applause]
        I want to just mention a couple of other people. First of all, thank
    you, Superintendent Ackerman, for welcoming
    me. I want to thank Harris Wofford, who is
    the head of the AmeriCorps program and VISTA. The AmeriCorps*VISTA
    volunteers are working to help solve this problem of the digital divide
    all over America. They're young people who are going back into our
    schools, going back into our community, helping people who otherwise
    wouldn't have a chance, and earning some money themselves for college.
    Some of you might want to consider joining AmeriCorps when you get out
    of high school.
        Stand up, Senator Wofford. Thank you very
    much. [Applause]
        I want to thank Angela Lee from AT&T and
    Julie Evans from NetDay for the work they have
    done to help connect all of our schools to the Internet. I want to thank
    three people in our administration: Gene Sperling, my National Economic Adviser, who has worked so hard on
    this; Secretary Daley, who is speaking in
    Harlem on this issue today; and I want to thank Vice President
    Gore for reasons I'll say in a moment, but
    he had a great deal to do with what we have been able to accomplish over
    the last 6 years.
        I just got a wonderful tour from Darnell
    and a chance to learn how technology is enhancing your educational
    mission. And as Steve Case said, it will only increase when you become
    one of these power-up sites. I learned every freshman is taking a
    computer literacy class. I learned students are going on-line to get
    help with their homework and learn what they need to do to prepare for
    college. I learned that you can chat in foreign languages with people
    around the world and work on projects with scientists from our Naval
    Research Lab.
        I was particularly pleased to learn about Epic Learning's long-term
    commitment to help students toward certificates in high-tech careers and
    about the way companies like 3M, AT&T, and Cisco, along with the AFL-
    CIO, are working to give you additional hardware, software, and teacher
    training.
        One thing that I think may be a downside from the students' point of
    view--it occurred to me when I was driving through the snow today--is
    that once we get everybody wired, you'll still have to go to school even
    when you can't get here, because you can just go on the Internet.
    [Laughter] But I think it's worth the sacrifice to give you a better
    future.
        I wanted to say to you--to give you some examples. When we talk
    about bridging the digital divide, what do we mean? We mean that
    everybody ought to have access to a computer; everybody ought to have
    access to the Internet; everybody ought to know how to use it; and then
    we ought to make it possible for people to make the maximum use of it. I
    want to just give you some examples of what this incredibly profound
    change in our society has wrought in individual lives.
        Victor Shen is a high school junior in
    Whittier, Alaska. He dreams of becoming a professional mathematician,
    but he lives in a small school in our largest but most rural State. So
    his school doesn't offer college-level calculus. His town is so remote
    that he's cut off from the whole rest of the world for several months
    every winter. But he will soon have the chance to take the classes he
    needs to pursue his dream of becoming a mathematician by getting on-
    line. It wouldn't be there.
        It ought to be there for every person like him, in every rural area
    and every inner-city neighborhood in the entire United States of
    America. There are lots of Victor Shens out there. There are people in
    this high school who could become professional mathematicians,
    professional scientists. There are people like you in every community in
    this country. No one should be shut out of this.
        Listen to this. Two years ago a man named Clinton Johnson lost his little bakery on 125th Street in Harlem in
    New York City. He had no savings to support his wife and two children.
    But he found a community technology center near his home, learned HTML
    code, and got himself a good job as a web developer.
        Dale O'Reilley, a grandmother of two from
    Medford, New Jersey, was diagnosed 9 years ago with Lou Gehrig's
    disease. Now, even though she can no longer move or speak, a special
    laptop computer allows her to give voice to her thoughts, and she
    continues to write newspaper articles for the Philadelphia Inquirer.
        The areas in America with the highest unemployment are our Native
    American reservations.

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    I visited last year the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota,
    the home of the Oglala Sioux. The unemployment rate there is over 70
    percent. We're all looking for new ways for them to find things to do.
    They have very gifted artists and crafts and making Native American
    products. This year I ordered Christmas gifts from the Pine Ridge
    Reservation over the Internet. They would never be able to market their
    products across this Nation--never, ever. They wouldn't have the money
    to do it. But because they have a webpage, people like us can find them
    and help them to build their dreams.
        And before we came out here, I was talking to Steve about--I spent
    some time a few months ago with the executives of eBay out in Northern
    California. Some of you may have found eBay on the net. It's a trading
    site. And the company's going like crazy, because people love to buy and
    sell things. It's like an old-fashioned community like the farmers'
    market used to be in my hometown on Saturday morning. And people buy and
    sell all kinds of things on eBay. There are now over 20,000 Americans
    making a living, not working for eBay but buying and selling on the
    site, and many of them used to be on welfare. They found a way through
    the net to empower themselves through their minds to have a different
    future.
        Now, this is just the beginning. We have only scratched the surface.
    Imagine what it will be like when every single child in this country can
    just stretch a hand across a keyboard and pull up every book ever
    written, every painting ever created, every symphony or jazz piece ever
    composed; when high-speed wireless networks bring distant learning and
    telemedicine to every rural area in this country; when even the smallest
    business can compete worldwide just because they have access to people
    across the world through the net.
        This is the future we are trying to build. In 1994, when Vice
    President Gore and I sponsored the first NetDay to begin to hook all of
    our schools and all of our classrooms up to the Internet, only 3 percent
    of the classrooms in America were wired. Since then, the public and
    private sectors, through generous grants, through NetDays, volunteer
    work, and through the steep discounts that schools can get in access
    charges, thanks to the so-called E-rate which the Vice President pioneered--since then, we've gone from 3 percent
    of our classrooms connected to over half of our classrooms connected.
    And 90 percent of the schools in the United States today have at least
    one connection to the Internet. That's a big step forward, and I'm proud
    of that.
        But as you have already heard, there is still a big digital divide
    in this country. And it runs through income first. Low income families
    are far less likely to have access to the Internet and computers. There
    is also, for reasons we don't entirely understand, there is a separate
    racial and ethnic component to it. Among low income families, African-
    American and Hispanic families are less likely than other low income
    families to have computers and to be hooked up to the Internet.
        We also know that people who live in rural areas, regardless of
    their race, are far, far less likely to own computers and to be wired to
    the net--even though they, in some ways, need it more than anybody else
    because of their physical isolation--and that this is most pronounced in
    Indian country in the United States.
        Eventually this digital divide will deprive businesses of the
    workers they need. That's why I was so glad to see people training here
    to learn how to use and to repair computers. It could also widen
    inequality in our society between people, based on who's connected and
    who's not.
        Now, at a time when our country has the longest economic expansion
    in history and the lowest unemployment rate in 30 years and the lowest
    minority unemployment rates ever recorded, we must close the digital
    divide. We have worked too hard to turn this country around and to get
    it going in the right direction to let all this generation of young
    people wind up with greater inequality, when we have a chance to have
    greater equality of opportunity in America than ever in our history.
        Some of you may know that I have been going around America holding
    what I call new markets tours, to make the argument that with all the
    prosperity of the country, now is the time to recognize and be honest
    about the fact that not every community has felt the economic prosperity
    of the last few years and that it is our obligation to bring economic
    opportunity to all the neighborhoods and all the rural areas and all the
    Indian reservations, where they don't know there has been a recovery
    because it hasn't changed their lives. If we don't do it now, we will
    never get around to doing this. Now is the time to do it.

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        In April I am going to lead one of these new markets tours, focused
    only on this issue, closing the digital divide. What can we do to have
    the kind of stories I saw in your classroom today in every classroom and
    every neighborhood, among every group in every community in the United
    States? And I've asked Congress to help me. And I want to talk a little
    bit about what I think our job is.
        First of all, we ought to have a goal. I believe in having big
    goals. If you have big goals and you work towards them, even if you
    don't quite get there, you look around and you find you've come a long
    way. If you don't have big goals, you don't get much done. What should
    our big goal be? Our big goal should be to make connection to the
    Internet as common as connection to telephones is today. That's what our
    big goal ought to be.
        And I think we should start by making sure that every community has
    a technology center that serves not just young people but adults as
    well. [Applause] Yes, you can clap for that. That's all right. I don't
    want to take credit for this. We started doing this 2 years ago because
    Congresswoman Maxine Waters from California,
    who is here today, who was then chairman of the Congressional Black
    Caucus, brought this idea to our attention. She said, ``You ought to
    have community technology centers everywhere for the adults, for the
    people who aren't in the schools. They need access to this, too.''
        These centers were working so well that we tripled our investment in
    them last year. And I have given Congress a budget that will triple our
    investment in them again so we can have 1,000 community centers with
    computers serving the adults of America who otherwise would not have
    access to them. Thank you very much, Congresswoman Waters, and I hope we can pass it.
        Second, we want to join with the private sector to bring more
    computers and Internet access into the homes of low income people.
    Public-spirited members of the high-tech community have already helped
    us--pledged to help us on this. I know of at least two places in America
    where there is a serious program, thanks to the private sector, not only
    to hook up all the classrooms but to give more low income students'
    parents computers in their homes and make sure they know how to E-mail
    the school and keep working back and forth on the homework, on the
    progress of life in school.
        In one of these districts in particular, in New Jersey, where a lot
    of the students are first-generation immigrants whose parents' main
    language is not English, there has been an explosion in student
    performance, in part because the net has enabled the parents who are
    working all day, who are busy, who hardly have enough money to support
    their children, but because they're connected, they can be directly
    involved through E-mail in their children's education. It made a big
    difference. And we need to recognize that as much as we can do with the
    community centers, which we ought to do now, eventually we're going to
    have to give home access to low income people just like the rest of us
    have, and I think we should be working on it.
        Third thing I want to do is to ask Congress to give private
    companies a couple of billion dollars--that's a lot of money--in tax
    incentives to get them to build and support these community technology
    centers, donate quality computers, and provide computer training.
        Fourth, I want to do more to give--this is a big issue--I bet you
    notice this here; I bet some teachers know this--we must do more to give
    quality technology training to all of our new teachers in America, to
    make sure they're as good with computers as they are with textbooks. You
    can have all the computers in the world, and if the kids know more about
    it than the teachers--which is often the case, at least if they're as
    technologically challenged as I have been in my life--we'll be behind.
        Why should we expect teachers who did not grow up in the computer
    age to just know everything they should know to teach the kids
    everything they can teach to maximize this? We should do more. We owe it
    to the teachers of this country to give them all the training they need
    to maximize all this hardware and software that we're doing our best to
    put at their fingertips, and at the use of their students.
        Next thing we need to do is bring high-speed networks to underserved
    communities. Businesses are looking for high-speed Internet access when
    they consider new sites. One of the problems I've got in trying to
    convince people that--even with tax incentives--they ought to go to
    isolated areas is they don't have high-speed Internet access, and time
    is money. So it's very important to do that.

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        And finally, we want to triple our investment in our Commerce
    Department's Technology Opportunity Program, to create innovative
    applications of technology for all low income communities. For example,
    we want to have health information systems that raise childhood
    immunization rates in inner cities. We want to have mentoring for at-
    risk youth that can be done via the Internet. We believe there are a lot
    of things that can be done to lift the lives of low income people and to
    bring benefits to them that normally aren't there, if we just think
    about it and we give people the tools who live in these communities to
    think about it and find ways to maximize their future.

        It would be a terrible irony of our time if these tools, these
    information revolutionary tools that are breaking down barriers all over
    the world--and I'll just give you one more fact. When I became
    President--now, to the kids, this seems like a long time ago, but for
    the adults, it won't be--when I became President 7 years and 2 weeks
    ago, there were 50--50 sites on the World Wide Web--50. Today, there are
    over 50 million. And it's the fastest growing means of communication in
    history by far. Nothing even comes close.

        And as a result, I told somebody the other day--you know, I come
    from a small town in rural Arkansas, and I've got a cousin that plays
    chess once or twice a week with a guy in Australia. I mean, it's
    unbelievable. This is the kind of thing that's going on. This tool is
    breaking down barriers between nations and cultures and enabling us to
    come together, and it's opening up all these wonderful opportunities. It
    would be a tragedy if we allowed this instrument that is also breaking
    down barriers to build up new barriers to people living their dreams,
    simply because they didn't have access to it. That's what this whole
    thing is about.

        There are kids in this gym today, who in a former time might never
    have been able to even think about getting an education in some sort of
    esoteric technology or scientific subject, that will see something on
    the web that will spark your interest and that you will then be able to
    pursue, that could change your whole life. It would be wrong for you not
    to have that opportunity.

        There are people here today who will understand that they can use
    this tool to make a living and to create economic opportunity in this
    part of Washington, DC, that's never been there. It would be wrong for
    you not to have that opportunity.

        There are people here today who can find out information about
    things that already exist. I saw--one young woman was looking at the
    questions she should ask in going to college. Every one of you should
    know that already on the books, we have passed tax credits,
    scholarships, and loans so that at least 2 years of college is
    affordable to everybody in America now--I don't care how poor you are.
    And if the Congress passes the legislation before them now, 4 years of
    college will be affordable to everybody in America--I don't care what
    your income is. You need to know that.

        And it will be tragic if this instrument, that has done more to
    break down barriers between people than anything in all of human
    history, built a new wall because not everybody had access to it. That's
    what this whole deal's about.

        Steve Case and I were talking--when Darnell was up here talking and
    he said, ``You know, I'm not little anymore,'' and he did that sort of,
    oh, shucks, routine, you know? [Laughter] I told Steve Case, I said,
    ``Boy, he is really good.'' [Laughter] And Steve said, ``Yes, I'm glad I
    don't have to follow him.'' [Laughter] I want every American to have a
    story like Darnell's. And this tool means
    that we don't have to give up on anybody. We don't have to leave anybody
    behind. We can all go forward together in the most exciting age this
    country has ever known. And we're here to tell you we will do our best
    to make sure you go.

        And I want to close, as Mr. Case did, by saying, it doesn't matter
    what technology you put before you--to the students--if you don't do
    your part. You've still got to be able to read. You've still got to be
    curious enough to want to learn. You've still got to be disciplined
    enough to be willing to work. But if you get your heart and your mind
    engaged, there should be no barrier to letting you live your dreams
    tomorrow. And we're going to do our best to take the barriers down.

        Thank you, and God bless you.

    Note: The President spoke at 11:35 a.m. in the gymnasium. In his
    remarks, he referred to Darnell Curley, teacher, and Wilma Durham and
    Art

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    Bridges, co-principals, Frank W. Ballou Senior High School; Mayor
    Anthony A. Williams of Washington, DC; Arlene Ackerman, superintendent,
    District of Columbia Public Schools; Angela Lee, director of government
    affairs for the District of Columbia, AT&T; and Julie Evans, chief
    executive officer, NetDay.