Darlene Hooley: “Mr. Chairman, a budget resolution is all about priorities. I think few people here would disagree that education has to…”

“Mr. Chairman, a budget resolution is all about priorities. I think few people here would disagree that education has to be one of our top priorities. All we have to do is look around at what is happening today. We have jobs being shipped overseas. We are retooling some of our manufacturing plants. What are our jobs going to be in the future? What do they require? The one thing we know they require is a good education. This underlying budget and the alternative fail our children, fail to provide the investment we need in our future. Last Congress, we passed sweeping education reforms. We said we want to have the best educated children in the world. We want to make sure that they live up to our expectations. But part of that agreement was funding. This budget leaves children behind. It does not fund Leave No Child Behind. We promised 29 years ago we were going to make sure that children with disabilities, that that was funded so our local schools would not have to pick up the whole piece of that. Last year in our Budget Committee we said, this is a good idea, Republicans and Democrats agreed that we should fully fund IDEA; and we said, we are going to have it done by 2010. This year if you look at the budget starting in 2005, it increases by a half a percent a year, which means we will never get there.”