Bill Clinton: “Programs like the one you're in will be funded basically based on the initiative of people at the local level. So if…”

“Programs like the one you're in will be funded basically based on the initiative of people at the local level. So if there's a program like this one at the local level which you're participating in, then it will be eligible to get community service funding. So the answer is maybe yes, maybe no. And let me tell you why that's important. We don't want to set up a big new national bureaucracy to tell every State and every community what they should teach and what they should do. What we want to do is to build on the strengths of existing community programs like the one you're involved in. In other words, why should we come into New Jersey and create some big bureaucracy and waste a lot of money hiring people to administer programs when you've got a perfectly good program here who can access the money and use it all to put people to work teaching art or whatever else you're doing. So the answer is that the people who are interested in arts education throughout America, once this national program is passed, should make sure that that is an important part of the community service efforts in every State and every community. Because they will be certainly eligible for it, but we're not going to tell people what to do. As a matter of fact, we'll have relatively few mandates in this program. The two things we are going to do is to require every State to try to provide opportunities for college graduates to be either teachers or police officers, because we know we've got a shortage of both of them in every State. But otherwise, particularly with the college students themselves or with young people who are like you, who are in school and may be earning credit toward going to college or getting job training, we're going to let that be highly decentralized so that you can meet the needs in each community and State. National and Community Service Program”