Political Quotes

“first of all let me preface my remarks in relationship to this amendment by indicating that there are no Federal mandates dealing with curriculum in any local school district. There is only one Federal mandate dealing with curriculum in relationship to the States, and that is the one that I want to talk about, and that is the one to which my amendment applies. IDEA is a Federal mandate, the only curriculum mandate from the Federal Government. It is a mandate on the State, who then mandates to the local level what they must carry out in relationship to IDEA. When it was passed many years ago, 30 years ago, the Federal Government said we are giving the mandate and we are going to give you 40 percent of the money. Unfortunately, they gave 99 percent of the mandate, but about 8 percent of the money. Local school districts now are finding it very, very difficult to fund the special education mandate that comes from the Federal Government. As a minority member working on the Committee on the Budget for 6 years in a bipartisan way, we tried to change that, and it did not work. Last year I said thank you to this committee, because as long as the mandate is there and we have the responsibility to put the money where our mouth is, this committee that is on the floor today saw fit to raise that amount rather dramatically. The idea was that we would keep doing that, hopefully until we got to the 40 percent.”