[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 36, Number 18 (Monday, May 8, 2000)]
[Pages 988-990]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
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,

[[Page 989]]

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 heated in the winter with coal-fired furnaces, where 
people literally shovel coal into them like they did a hundred 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 everyone 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

[[Page 990]]

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 
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 Barbara Hess, teacher, who introduced the 
President; Henry L. Caudle, principal, Kelly L. Witt, student body 
president, and Frederick L. (Ricky) Harris III, senior class president, 
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; and Mayor Mark W. 
Schwiebert of Rock Island, IL; and Jim Blanche, superintendent, 
Davenport School District.