John Thune: “our children are our most important and precious resource. We ought to make very certain that they have the opportunity…”

“our children are our most important and precious resource. We ought to make very certain that they have the opportunity to learn in safe and drug-free schools, to be taught by our brightest and best teachers, and to ensure that they have the highest possible opportunity to learn. And that is one thing we have been failing our children on. Mr. Speaker, today the other thing I would note about our educational system is that our parents ought to know that when they send their education tax dollars to Washington that they are going to get spent on our children, on helping them learn at the fastest rate possible. This last week we learned of another blatant example of waste, fraud and abuse in Washington, and that was when $2 million at the Education Department was siphoned off from two schools in South Dakota and spent to buy a Cadillac, an SUV, and a house in Maryland. It took a car dealer, a car dealer, who broke this story, because the Education Department did not know what was going on. It is another example, Mr. Speaker, of why we need to get the education dollars back into the classroom, back to our school administrators, and our school boards and our parents so that they are being spent on our children and not in the Washington bureaucracy.”