While Schools Decay, We Can't Turn Away
Here's what you'll find in too many public schools in America today: "Classrooms" fashioned out of storage rooms, school cafeterias and stages because of school overcrowding. Extreme temperatures in classrooms that require students and staff to wear coats indoors in the winter and to swelter in dangerous heat in warmer months. Bathroom floors slick from toilets that routinely leak. Mold, mouse droppings, falling ceiling tiles, and other unsafe and unacceptable conditions. The message to our kids? You are not worth the effort to fix it.
Last month, President Obama sent Congress the American Jobs Act, a bill designed to help alleviate these problems and send a strong message that America is worth fixing. The legislation, if enacted by Congress, provides a powerful tool for the United States to address the decay of many of our school buildings, roads and bridges; to keep educators in classrooms where their students need them; and to help millions of people whose skills provide great societal benefit get back to work. But initial efforts to move this bold legislation forward were shut down last week, when Senate Republicans voted