Political Quotes

“summer is ending and the school year is going to begin in a few weeks in many States. But as students prepare for the school year, many wonder what the school and classroom will look like. Parents are reading news reports about budget cuts and wonder how that will affect the schools their kids attend--whether art, music, foreign language offerings will be cut and whether some teachers will be gone and how many students will be crowded into one classroom. These worries are justified. The recession we are now working our way through has crippled many local and State budgets. In Illinois, the fiscal year 2011 budget has a $13 billion deficit. As a result, the Governor has proposed serious cuts to public education. It has been projected that, in Illinois, come this new school year, we will have as many as 17,000 fewer teachers. Our State is not alone. States across the country, looking to balance their budgets, are faced with these same hard choices. Through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the stimulus package President Obama brought forward when he was elected, we acted to save schools, and our investment worked. The State fiscal stabilization fund helped save or create more than 300,000 education jobs across the country. We bought a year, in the hopes that this recession would have turned around. Well, it is moving in the right direction, but we are still suffering from many aspects of it.”