Timothy Roemer: “the gentleman mentioned this case from a teacher in his home State, North Carolina, of 31 children in one classroom; and…”

“the gentleman mentioned this case from a teacher in his home State, North Carolina, of 31 children in one classroom; and it just brings home what we have been saying over the last hour: parental involvement, class size, quality teacher, discipline, character education in that school and some professional development opportunities for the teacher are keys for that school room to work. Let us say with those 31 children that six of them are at risk of dropping out, five of them may have some kind of learning disability or have a prescription of Ritalin, and then there might be another five that are gifted and talented, and the teacher needs to spend more time with them. So right there, we have a number out of that 31, we probably have 16 children or so that are somewhere in between. What does that teacher do with 31 kids? Should there be some role in a partnership, not mandating from Washington, D.C., that we say this to our local schools, but giving local schools some of the resources and some of the opportunity to say, if this is a big problem in our local community in North Carolina with 31 kids in the school room, we want to do something about it?”