Bill Lee: “I want to thank the gentleman for offering this amendment, and I rise in strong support of it. It restores funding to…”

“I want to thank the gentleman for offering this amendment, and I rise in strong support of it. It restores funding to the Magnet Schools Assistance Program. Now, 60 years after Brown v. Board of Education, the data shows that many schools and communities continue to suffer from the vestiges of segregation and that many of our Nation's largest school districts remain starkly segregated along racial and economic lines. Now, I just have to say, when I started elementary school, schools were segregated in El Paso, Texas. Sixty years later, now, it is really something. We have come a long way, but we have a long way to go. This amendment, the Magnet Schools Assistance Program--the amendment helps assist school districts in promoting desegregation long overdue. I am glad that we increased this program in fiscal 2017 omnibus by $1 million. That additional funding was intended to allow the program to increase the total number of grantees. I was disappointed to see that the majority took a step back from the progress that we had made and imposed a cut to this program in the underlying bill. Why in the world would the majority not want to see school segregation ended? This amendment certainly leads us in that direction, and I strongly support it, and I hope you would reconsider your opposition because many of us remember those days.”