Steven Holt: “Of course the real purpose of our being here this evening is to call attention to the action that we have yet to take…”

“Of course the real purpose of our being here this evening is to call attention to the action that we have yet to take here in the House of Representatives, to call on the leadership to act on these bills. The school construction bill is a wonderful partnership between the Federal Government and the local school district, and it is applicable not just in schools that are overcrowded because of a booming population, such as in my district. It is also applicable to the school districts where the schools are aging. Across the country the average age of a school now is well beyond what a business or industry would consider satisfactory for use. It is well into the 40 years for an average school. In New Jersey it is actually closer to 50 years for the average age of schools. We have all heard stories of ceiling collapses, of teachers who put cheesecloth over the vents to stop the lead paint flecks from coming in to the classroom. Estimates by the civil engineering societies say that school construction is the number one infrastructure need of the United States of America, and to put America's classrooms reasonably up-to-date would have a price tag of several hundreds of billions of dollars.”