Burgess Owens: “Public School 91 in my district was evacuated last Friday as a result of conditions that were deemed unsafe for…”

“Public School 91 in my district was evacuated last Friday as a result of conditions that were deemed unsafe for children. You have got lead poisoning, a coal-burning furnace, everything you can imagine in that building which was built in 1903. It should have been closed a long time ago. But Public School 91 is not atypical of the school districts across America. In fact nearly every congressional district in America has an equivalent to Public School 91, a school that really needs to be closed or modernized or reconstructed. We have an education emergency all across the United States. Why not bring our money back to our school districts? All money comes from the local areas, anyhow. Bring our Federal money back for school construction. One of my colleagues on the Education Committee keeps insisting that the school construction bill is tilted toward the urban areas. Well, yes, that is where most of the children in America live. The Vietnam Memorial Monument, if you look at the names on there, most of them come from the urban areas, too. All the wars that have existed, while we have not emphasized it, they come from where the population is. Schools modernization is needed all across America. Urban areas are just the beginning.”