[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 34, Number 42 (Monday, October 19, 1998)]
[Pages 2052-2059]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at the White House Conference on School Safety

October 15, 1998

    The President. Thank you. Your kindness is interfering with my 
determination to stay on schedule. [Laughter] But thank you very much. I 
want to thank Secretary Riley and Attorney General Reno for their 
devotion and consistent work on this matter. I thank the Vice President. 
He and Hillary and I are delighted to have all of you here at the White 
House today, and the many, many people all across America who are 
joining us, thanks to the technological revolution.
    I thank the Members of Congress who are here. And Governor, thank 
you for coming, and the mayors and the other members of the 
administration, and all the distinguished citizens who are here. Our 
good friend Edward James Olmos, thank you for being here.
    I saw a survey, a public opinion survey, a few months ago that asked 
the American people what they thought the most important story of the 
first 6 months of 1998 was, and dwarfing everything else was the concern 
our people had for the children who were killed in their schools. And I 
think that your presence here and the number of people who are involved 
all across America, the quality of the panelists and, indeed, the 
courage of many of them--the mother of one of the children killed at 
Jonesboro, Arkansas, in my home State, was on the morning panel with 
Hillary--this is truly a moving thing. And it's a very important thing 
for our country.
    You know, when I leave here--and I hope I don't have to leave before 
this panel is over, but I think all of you know that we have been able 
to put together a conference for several days, a meeting between the 
Prime Minister of Israel and the Chairman of the PLO in our attempts to 
make the next big step toward peace in the Middle East. And I got to 
thinking about it on the way over here today, as I was walking over from 
the Oval Office, and all the things I'm trying to get these people to 
lay down and get over and give up, so they can go on with their 
children's future, so that we can stop innocent children from being 
killed in the place in the world that is the home of the world's three 
great monotheistic religions.
    It's all a part of our attempt not to give up on anybody and not to 
permit hatred or anger to destroy even one child's life anywhere. And if 
we're going to do that elsewhere in the world, to try to be a force for 
good, then we have to be as good as we can here at home. And all of you 
are trying to help us achieve that, and I'm very, very grateful to you.
    Because this is the only chance I'll have to do it today, and 
because all of you care so much about education, I'd like to just take a 
moment to talk about where these budget

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negotiations are on Capitol Hill. They're about to conclude, I hope. 
They've certainly gone on long enough. But we're not quite there yet. 
However, even though there are still points outstanding, I believe we'll 
succeed. And as the Vice President said, one thing we know already, we 
know that now this budget will reflect a major commitment to education 
and to the future of our children.
    I am very pleased it will make the first installment on our plan to 
hire 100,000 new teachers. You heard the Vice President's catalog of the 
class size issue, but the Secretary of Education tells me that we 
haven't fully grasped it because, unlike the baby boom, we think that 
this increase in our children will go on more or less indefinitely, and 
we've got a lot of very fine teachers in the classroom who will be 
retiring in the next few years. So this is a huge challenge for us.
    The United States has never before done anything like this. And 
there were a lot of people who honestly thought I was wrong to fight for 
this or they disagreed with me, but it seems to me that we had enough 
experience when we put 100,000 police on the street. I was told the 
United States had never done anything like that before. We didn't have 
anything to do with telling the cities where the police should go, but 
the results have been pretty satisfactory. And everywhere I go, someone 
mentions it to me.
    If it worked there and we have crime at a 25-year low, how much more 
important is it to put the children in the classroom? And this will make 
a major downpayment toward our goal of an average class size of 18 in 
the early grades, very different from what has been reported.
    And I should also say that when the Attorney General and the 
Secretary of Education went out across the country in the wake of all of 
these school shootings and they met with educators and they met with 
people talking about how we can prevent these things from happening in 
the first place, one of the things that they were told was, ``Get us 
small classes in the early grades so that we can get to know these 
children, find out the ones who obviously have got some serious 
problems, and try to get them the help they need before their lives and 
others' are irrevocably changed.'' So this is a very, very good day for 
the United States.
    There were some other very important educational initiatives that 
will be fully supported: our child literacy drive, to make sure every 
child can read independently by the end of the third grade; our college 
mentoring drive, to help lower-income students prepare for college and 
to be able to tell every one of them what kind of financial aid they'll 
get if they stay in school and learn their lessons and stay out of 
trouble. It increases support for Head Start, expands the number of 
innovative charter schools. There are now a thousand of those schools in 
America; there was one when I became President, and there will be 3,000 
before we're done in 2000. We will provide for half a million summer 
jobs for our young people, a program that many had sought to eliminate. 
It will provide for after-school programs for a quarter million young 
people. And I think we all know how important that is.
    I'm very, very grateful for the strong support I have received from 
the members of my party in the Congress to turn away attempts to 
actually cut funds from our public schools and instead to renew our 
historic commitment to them, to more and better-trained teachers, to 
smaller classes, to hooking up all those classrooms to the Internet by 
the year 2000, for extra support for children who need it, for 
accountability and choice. This is what I mean by putting partisanship 
behind progress, by putting people ahead of politics. And I am grateful 
to all those in both parties who are responsible for pulling this 
agreement together.
    There's still a lot to be done. A lot of these teachers we'll hire 
will have to hold class in trailers or hallways or crowded or crumbling 
classrooms. I proposed in the State of the Union a targeted tax cut for 
school modernization that was fully paid for, wouldn't take a dime from 
the surplus, won't create a single new Federal bureaucracy, but it will 
lower the cost of building these buildings. It could mean as much as 300 
new schools in Florida alone next year.
    If our children are learning in trailers and schools with broken 
windows and where the wiring won't even permit them to be hooked up to 
computers, then we're not getting them

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ready for the 21st century. So I do want to say, while I am profoundly 
grateful for the 100,000 teachers, I am determined to see that we finish 
the job next year in the next Congress.
    Now, I also want to thank the First Lady for her role in this 
conference. We've been at this a long time. In 1983, when I was Governor 
of our State, I asked Hillary to chair a commission on school standards, 
and one of the things that we fought hardest for, that was very 
controversial at the time, was to have a class size limit of 20 in the 
early grades. And 15 years ago, it was a hard fight, and we got it. And 
I haven't checked the numbers yet, but I bet, given the growth in 
population in our schools, they're being swamped and hard-pressed to 
meet it. And we really believe that making this a national goal and 
sticking with it will pay major, major benefits to our children all 
across the country.
    Let me also say what I've already said a little bit of. The American 
people--if I had been polled, I would have been right there with them. I 
think that all of us were shocked by the violence we saw in Springfield 
and Paducah and Jonesboro and Edinboro and Pearl. I think we're still 
disturbed when we see the sights of metal detectors in school doorways 
or see gangs of young people who are on the streets when they ought to 
be in the halls of their schools.
    We know that there are still some schools where children are afraid 
to go to school. And doing something about school violence, therefore, 
is very important, but also we have to understand the nature, the 
magnitude of the problem. Why do some teenagers from some troubled 
backgrounds pick up guns and open fire on their classmates? Why do some 
teenagers who don't appear to have trouble at home do the same thing? 
What is at the bottom of this, and what can we really do?
    You know, I have to say this--and I'm not blaming anybody because 
I've done it myself, so I will say I will posit the fact that I have 
done this--but when people are in elected office and they hear about a 
problem like this and they know the people they're doing their best to 
represent are afraid, the first impulse is always to say, ``Well, if we 
just punish them a little harder and a little faster and kept them a 
little longer, everything would be all right.'' Now, the truth is that 
some people are so far gone and what they have done is so heinous that 
that is the appropriate thing to do. But I have never met a police 
officer in my life who believed that we could punish our way out of our 
social problems without other appropriate actions--not one time. And I 
think we're all here because we believe in a good society we would stop 
more bad things from happening in the first place.
    The report that's being released today tells us that the vast 
majority of our schools are safe, that the majority of our children are 
learning in peace and security. But it also tells us that in too many 
schools students feel unsafe. Even if they're not, if they feel unsafe, 
it's going to have a huge detrimental impact on their ability to learn 
and grow and relate to their fellow students in an appropriate way.
    In too many schools, there is still too much disrespect for 
authority and still too much intolerance of other students from 
different backgrounds. Our schools, all of them, must be sanctuaries of 
safety and civility and respect. Now, here are some things that I think 
we can do to help you meet the challenge.
    First, in the schools with the biggest violence problems, security 
has to be the top priority. Today, I am pleased to announce a new $65-
million initiative to help schools hire and train 2,000 new community 
police and school resource officers to work closely with principals and 
teachers and parents and the students themselves to develop antiviolence 
and antidrug plans, based on the actual needs of individual schools. 
Community policing has helped to make our streets safe. It can work for 
our schools, too.
    I'm also very pleased that Congressman Jim Maloney of Connecticut 
has sponsored a bill to help schools use the funds available for hiring 
the community police officers to hire officers to work with the schools. 
This bill was passed by the House and Senate and it will get up here to 
me in a day or two and I'll look forward to signing it into law.
    Second, we have to help schools recognize the early warning signs of 
violence and to respond to violence when it does strike. Today I want to 
tell you that soon I will be

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sending to Congress a plan to create a School Emergency Response to 
Violence, the SERV program, that will work just as FEMA does when it 
responds to natural disasters. Project SERV will travel to where the 
trouble is and help communities respond quickly to school violence, from 
helping schools to meet increased security needs, to providing emergency 
and longer-term mental health crisis counseling for students, faculty, 
and their families.
    Now, let me just say a word here of appreciation to somebody who is 
not here, to Tipper Gore, who, once she became 50, fell victim to the 
Vice President and my propensity for leg injuries--[laughter]--but, you 
know, more than any other person in America, since we've been here in 
the White House, she has tried to elevate the importance of proper 
mental health care and the fundamental dignity of it. And I think that 
we have got to, all of us, keep working until we remove any last vestige 
of stigma that attaches to getting treatment for children who have 
troubling mental problems. We know that most of them, the vast majority 
of them, can be treated successfully. And we know that it is not a cause 
for shame or denial among families. And we have to keep working on that. 
And all of you, I ask you to join Tipper Gore and others who understand 
this and try to make that a part of our approach to this issue as well.
    Third, we can't stop the prevention efforts at the schoolhouse door. 
As I said, the budget agreement we reached today will double or more the 
after-school programs that keep young people safe after the bell rings. 
But if young people leave the safe school and enter an unsafe community, 
they're in trouble.
    Today we want to announce two new steps to help them met that 
challenge. Our safe schools/safe communities initiative will help 10 
targeted communities develop plans to reduce youth violence and drug use 
in and out of school--not only more police but after-school programs, 
mentoring, counseling, conflict resolution, mental health services, and 
more. We wanted to put together, in at least 10 places that don't have 
it now, a truly comprehensive approach.
    I'm also pleased to announce that in response to constructive 
criticism and suggestions from many Members of Congress and educators 
and community leaders across this country, we're going to overhaul our 
safe and drug-free schools program, which we have dramatically increased 
in the last few years, to require schools who get the funds to establish 
tough, but fair discipline rules; to put in place proven drug prevention 
strategies; to issue yearly school safety and drug use report cards to 
measure their own progress. These methods have worked so well in cities 
like Boston; they can work around the country, and it will guarantee 
that the money that's being spent will actually achieve the results that 
it's been appropriated to achieve.
    Fourth, we have to expect more from young people themselves. Given 
the facts, the resources, the encouragement, almost all of them will do 
the right thing. This year we launched a huge media campaign to tell 
young people that drugs are wrong, illegal, and can kill you. Now we 
have to tell them they, too, have responsibilities to prevent youth 
violence, to help their fellow students who are violence prone, to 
report trouble signs they see, and try to help kids get the help they 
need.
    I am pleased that MTV is going to work with us to launch a new 
campaign to encourage people to become mentors--young people--to help 
their peers resolve their conflicts peacefully. And again, I'm very 
grateful, and I'd like for all of you to join me in thanking MTV for 
their willingness to invest in this important endeavor. [Applause]
    Lastly--I've spoken a little longer than I meant to because I want 
to really hear the panelists, but I return to the theme on which I began 
and what I will do when I leave here in working for the peace process in 
the Middle East. We have got to do more to teach our young people to 
have tolerance and respect for one another, to understand the rich and 
only superficial dichotomy that the more we appreciate each other's 
diversity, the more we reaffirm the fundamental core values and 
existence we have in common.
    The recent death of young Matthew Shepard in Wyoming makes it all 
too clear to us that violence still can be motivated by prejudice and 
hatred. Yes, we do need a new

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hate crimes law. And I have directed the Education Department Civil 
Rights Office to step up its enforcement to stop discrimination and 
harassment against students. But again, ultimately, we have to be 
reconciled to one another. We have to believe in one another's 
fundamental humanity and equal right to be here and to become whatever 
they can become.
    And I hope that all of us--the young people of this country, because 
our school population is more diverse than ever before, and because to 
some extent they are unburdened by some of the problems that their 
parents and grandparents grew up with, can go either way with this 
issue. If they become the victims of a kind of a current climate of 
prejudice and bigotry and a sense of opposition and isolation because of 
our increasing diversity, it could wreak total havoc in this country in 
a way that we can't even imagine and even couldn't have imagined in the 
old days of the civil rights years. But if they do what they will do, 
left to their own better selves, then the increasing diversity of 
America is something that will guarantee us renewed strength, 
unparalleled opportunities in the 21st century world. So I don't think 
we should forget that, either. In the end, the human heart still counts 
for quite a great deal, and we ought to bring out the best in all the 
ones we can.
    Now, I would like to start the program, and I'm going to sit down to 
do it. And I'd like to begin with Mr. Kent, Jamon Kent, who is the 
superintendent of the Springfield, Oregon, public schools, that I had 
the honor to visit after the terrible incident there. And because we're 
running a little late, I'm going to do something a little bit 
unconventional. I'm going to call on all the panelists to make their 
remarks and then open for questions, starting with Mr. Kent.

[At this point, the panel discussion began.]

    The President. I don't want to violate my own rule, so I won't ask a 
question, but I do want to highlight one thing he said, because if it 
resonates with your experience, then we need your feedback to the 
Attorney General and to the Secretary of Education, ultimately, to the 
Congress.
    We now have a national policy of zero tolerance for guns in schools. 
Last year I believe the number of--the Secretary of Education can 
correct me if I make a mistake--last year I believe there were 6,000 
children who were found--students who were found with guns. Guns were 
taken, and they were sent home. This actually happened in Oregon to this 
young man right before he came back the next day and killed the kids.
    So the question is, what is--we have to find a constitutional fix 
here, and then the schools have to have the resources so that you don't 
just take a gun and expel somebody because there's obviously something 
going on inside the child that is just as important as the physical 
manifestation of having the gun. So that was the one thing that they've 
really done in Springfield, is to sort of spark a nationwide 
reassessment of what we ought to do with the children besides just send 
them home.
    And they've proposed a period of 72 hours or some sort of period of 
evaluation, and we're trying to work out the details of it. But if any 
of you have any thoughts about this, I would ask you to give it to us, 
because that's a very clear issue that was raised in the Springfield 
case, that I must confess, until I went and talked to them, had never 
occurred to me before.
    I'd like to now call on Commissioner Paul Evans, the police 
commissioner from Boston, who led Boston's innovative operation cease-
fire. I spent a half a day up there with the mayor and the commissioner 
and others several months ago. Any many of you know that Boston went for 
over 2 years without having a single child under 18 killed by a gun. 
That's an astonishing thing.
    And so I would like for Commissioner Evans to make whatever remarks 
he'd like to make on this subject.

[The panel discussion continued.]

    The President. I would like to make one brief observation about what 
the commissioner said, because I have spent a great deal of time in 
Boston, and I don't want to single them out in derogation of the 
astonishing efforts that have been made elsewhere, many of which have 
already been featured. But the thing that strikes me--it struck me when 
I

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spent a day up there and I met with--the mayor's got a nun who 
represents him, who has this youth council for the city. The city has 
its own youth council, like others have the city council. But the thing 
that struck me about Boston is they do things that seem obvious when you 
hear about them, but a lot of people don't do it. The systematic contact 
that they have in a personal, one-to-one way, with a huge percentage of 
the young people in their cities is quite astonishing.
    And if somebody asked me, in a sentence, why have they been so 
successful, I would say they mobilize in a systematic way a consistent 
contact with a huge percentage of the young people. The idea of, you 
know, ``Well, we hear we're going to have a gang problem in middle 
school. Why don't we go interview the customers.'' You know, if you were 
running a business that's exactly what you'd do. But I think they 
deserve a lot of appreciation, but also a lot of modeling for that.

[The panel discussion continued.]

    The President. I have two brief things to say. First of all, don't 
you feel better knowing that there are people like her in the classrooms 
of America? [Applause]
    And second, I want to thank you for what you said about school 
uniforms. When Secretary Riley and I set out to promote school uniforms 
around the country, there were some here in Washington who derided this 
as one of those ``little ideas'' that we were constantly harping on. It 
may be a little idea, but I have never been to a school that had them 
that didn't think it made a huge difference in the lives of the children 
there. And so I thank you for giving a boost to that endeavor.

[The panel discussion continued.]

    The President. Thank you very much. First of all, I want to 
apologize to all of you, and in particular to Mayor Corradini, who made 
a terrific presentation, according to the First Lady. I got a call. We 
just completed our agreement on the budget and the negotiations. In a 
half hour or so, for the members of the press, we'll have a statement 
about that.
    But let me say, first, I think about Congressman Etheridge, it is--
one of the things that we desperately--that we need so much in 
Congress--Congress works better when there are people in the Congress 
who have all kinds of different experiences that are relevant. It's an 
incredible gift that we have a Member of the House of Representatives 
that was actually a State superintendent of public instruction. And the 
influence he can have on other Members and the role he can play in the 
years ahead I think is virtually limitless just because of the life he 
lived before he came there. And I'm very grateful for what he said today 
and for what he's done.
    I would also like to thank Mayor Corradini for the report, for the 
recommendations, and for the ``Best Practices'' booklet. I think that we 
need--every single challenge we've got in this country, we'd be a lot 
better off if everybody who was working on it issued a ``Best 
Practices'' book, because one of my pet theories is that everybody 
solved every problem somewhere, but we're not very good at playing 
copycat when we ought to. So I thank her for that.
    The only other thing I want to say, and then I want to turn it over 
to the Vice President and let him ask a question, is that the mayors 
recommended new youth counselors, and Bob talked about other kinds of 
support personnel on security issues. One of the things that we had to 
fight hardest for in 1983, that Hillary convinced me we ought to do 15 
years ago, was to require every elementary school to have a counselor. 
But 15 years later, it looks like a pretty good decision.
    And I think we have to--with people who have to pay for these 
things, with the taxpayers and others who may not deal with it, we need 
to let them know that a well-trained counselor dealing with the kind of 
challenges these children face is a terrific investment. And I 
appreciate the recommendation of the mayors, and I look forward to 
following up on them.

[The panel discussion continued.]

    The President. Well, it would depend on whether it was an elementary 
school or higher grades. If you start with an elementary school, I would 
have an elementary school that would have classes of between 15 and

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20 in the early grades. I would have a maximum number of kids in the 
school of about 300. I would have--and about 1,000 for the high school. 
I would have the support personnel. I'd have all the teachers trained, 
and I'd have a parent coordinator that had huge numbers of the parents 
coming in and out of the schools all the time.
    And then I'd try to figure out how to make young people like Liberty 
the rule rather than the exception. That is--I was sitting here when she 
was telling her story--I was thinking about--she got to the Boys and 
Girls Club, and that's a good thing, but there's a whole bunch of kids 
that live in the place where she does that didn't get there, and that's 
not a good thing. And so I think that would mean you'd either have 
comprehensive before- and after-school programs and summer school 
programs for the kids on site, or there would be some system by which 
the school, in effect, connected every child to responsible adult 
community groups of some kind that Professor Earls says works so well.
    I think those are the things that I would--I basically believe 
you've got to have problemsolving mechanisms, but I think the prevention 
approach is by far the best approach. And I think almost all--so that's 
what I would do.
    In the high schools, it's more complicated. I'd also have a uniform 
policy. I think they're very important. I'd be in a community that had a 
strong antitruancy policy. If I had a violence problem, I'd have a 
curfew. I'd be interconnected with all of the churches and synagogues 
and other faith institutions. I would have the school bringing people in 
in a systematic way, and I would be connected with the police department 
that would do what the commissioner explained that they try to do in 
Boston.
    But I think--in the high schools, I think that, as I said, I'd make 
sure that we had programs that would keep every child who needed it, 
give them all an opportunity to be in the school.
    Let me just say one other thing that I think is worth saying. It may 
have been put on the table while I was out briefly. But twice--if you 
read what the mayors say here, twice, they say, they talk about the 
importance of the arts programs, the music programs, the physical 
education programs, not the kids that are on the athletic teams, the 
other things. I have seen school after school after school all across 
this country, because of the financial burdens on the schools, have to 
abandon these programs. And I think it is terrible.
    I think that--basically, all of these people are saying you've got 
to treat the whole child here, deal with the whole child, deal with the 
family situation, deal with the community situation. And I just wanted 
to put in a little plug for that. I think that there are a lot of ways 
to learn in this life, a lot of ways to communicate in this life, and a 
lot of ways for people to find greater peace and connection. And I think 
it's been a terrible setback to American education that so many schools 
have had to abandon their art programs, their music programs and their 
physical education programs for the nonteam athletes. Anything we can do 
to advance that I think would also be positive.

[The panel discussion continued.]

    The President. Let me say, I wish we could stay here another hour, 
but we have another panel. We don't want to deprive them of the 
opportunity to make their contributions and to be heard. Perhaps at the 
end of that, you could have a more free-flowing question and answer 
session.
    But again, let me thank all of you. And let me ask you to join me in 
thanking all of our remarkable panelists for their contributions.
    Thank you.

Note: The President spoke at 1:28 p.m. in the East Room at the White 
House. In his remarks, he referred to actor Edward James Olmos; and Paul 
E. Patton of Kentucky. Participants in the conference were Jamon Kent, 
public schools superintendent, Springfield, OR; Paul Evans, police 
commissioner, Boston, MA; Liberty Franklin, Boys and Girls Club Youth of 
the Year; Joanna Quintana Barraso, teacher, Coral Way Elementary School, 
Miami, FL; Felton J. (Tony) Earls, professor, Harvard University, 
Cambridge, MA; Mayor Deedee Corradini of Salt Lake City, UT; and 
Representative Bob Etheridge.

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