Gregory Meeks: “just 9 months ago I was not a Member of this body, but I remember listening to the President's statement on education…”

“just 9 months ago I was not a Member of this body, but I remember listening to the President's statement on education during his State of the Union address, and I stand here today as a Member of the Congress probably for one reason: education. We can build prisons, or we can build schools. I think that all Americans know that the best solution is to build schools. When we build schools, we are showing our children that we have confidence in them. Oftentimes when they go astray, we say what happened to the children of the day? What is going on with the children today? Mr. Speaker, I tell colleagues it is not the children, it is us. It is us who fail to put our money where our mouths are and put it where our most important commodities are, our children. We must, at all sacrifices, make sure that we build schools; therefore, we will not have to build prisons. Make sure that we make the class sizes smaller so that we can understand, these kids can understand, what is going on, and the teachers can relate to them. This is what this is all about. We must not leave here until we have put money in schools as opposed to other things. We must build our schools.”