# View Appearance 

# I C-SPAN Congressional Chronicle, Created by Cable. Offered as a Pu...



# View Appearance**CONGR~;SSIONAL** nUDGET FOR THE UNITED STATES
s.!'REV GOVERNMENT FOR FISCAL YEARS 1999200020012002 AND**NEX'r~** 2003 Text From the Congressional Record 

# Page 1 ot3**)2Qrglln~** Byron [D·ND]

. 1998· Begin 

### (H'.Ol 15:1646
End 15:27:32 Length 00:10:46 Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I very much appreciate Senator Lautenberg yielding me the time. I am going to visit a bit some of the items that werejust discussed about Indian schools and schools generally. I wanted to come and talk about the Moseley-Braun amendment
We talk a lot about family values in this Chamber. It seems to me that every family that sits around in the evening and talks about their lives must certainly talk about the schools their kids are going to. We have 14 million students who attend schools in this country now, schools that are in need of extensive repair-extensive repair.
This afternoon, we sit in a nice Chamber. We have people here who enjoy their lives, and they are well dressed. We talk about education and theory in the abstract In Cannonball, NO, today there is some little kid silting in school, and I bet you that child is smelling sewer gas backed up from the pipes, because that is the way the school is down in Cannonball. That school is 70 years old. There are 150 kids attending that school with two bathrooms and one water fountain, and that school is in serious disrepair.
I just mention that one, but I could mention thousands of schools across this country that are in desperate need of repair. Senator 

### Moseley-Braun has proposed an amendment that says in this Budget Act let us make room for school construction, for the Federal Government to provide some incentive, some small incentive to State and local governments to help repair and rebuild our schools.
I have two children in public school this afternoon. Last year in public school, one of those children was in a classroom with 30 students. That is too big. This year, one of them is in a temporary classroom or an expanded mobile home. That is too bad. It is a good school, and both of them are getting a
good education. The fact is, we can do better in all of these areas, especially with respect to school construction. We know what the problem is and we know how to fix it The issue of the budget on the floor of the Senate is a matter of priorities. What do each of us think is important for this country. I watched last week during consideration of the supplemental appropriations bill someone come into this Chamber and offered an amendment that wentjust like that, just that quick, for $I70 million for missile defense. It wasn't debated, it wasn't discussed, it was just added. And there it was, $170 million.
Let me talk about these schools for a moment, and Ict me talk specifically about the Indian schools, because while we are talking about the 14 million students who are in school today in schools that need extensive repair, let me talk just for a moment about the students in the Indian schools run by the BIA. These are schools owned by the Federal Government They are owned by us. We have no one else to blame if we don't fix those schools, and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out how to fix it You can look at the school, find out what is wrong and spend the money to invest in that school to help those children.
Let me tell you about the Ojibwa school. That is up on the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation. Those children walk between portable classrooms in the middle of the winter up to six times a day in bone-chilling weather. A health and safety inspection of that school and temporary classrooms in 1995 found 156 violations

.. fire hazards, broken windows, roof leaking, wooden stairs and landings for portable classrooms had deteriorated so much to the point they were no longer safe, wires hanging exposed from some



# file://C:\Documents and Settings'jhsmith'My Documents\MyFiles\PCB ANPR\Electronic V... 2/3/2010

# View Appearance 

# I C-SPAN Congressional Chronicle, Created by Cable. Offered as a Pu...

classrooms.
The Cannonball School is a public school. It is not a BIA school. It is on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation for grades K through five. The school is 70 years old. It has been condemned as a fire hazard, but the local tax base cannot support building a new school. The second level of the school isn't used because the stairs are unsafe. The water and sewer systems arc old and regularly back up.
Last week, when we talked to the Cannonball School superintendent, she said two classes had to be moved in with other classes because the smell of sewage got so bad in the classrooms of these young children. One wing of the school doesn't have running water. Mr. President, 145 students and 40 staff share two bathrooms and one water fountain. The electric wiring is so old that it cannot support computers in the classrooms, but.it doesn't matter, because there can't be computers in these classrooms. The classrooms are 8 foot by 12 fool The music classes take place in what used to be the janitor's closet, 8 foot by 10 fool 

# Page 2 of3

Congress Calendar

Oc(oheL2009 Sun Man Tue Wed TIIU 

### Fri Sat 

### 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 

## Navigation

• Sem.e.h

..EnJ.iXe

.. s.ite • Person Search

• IJilLchmnQIQgy

• Abmll

•**WJ1ilt'LI\[~\y**
• LinkS

o C-SPAN Video

Lil)nlfY

o C-SJ'A_tLmg

o 

## Ihomas

• CQOtiletJJS!

• LDglO Standing Rock Reservation: Standing Rock School has PCBs leaking from the light fixtures. PCB, as we know, is a carcinogen. It is very dangerous. Federal law says that PCB levels over 50 parts per million are unsafe. In the Fort Yates school, the PCBs leaking from the light fixtures measured not 50 parts per million, which is unsafe, but 143,000 parts per million. That is in our school. That is with kids attending school.
What happened? They shut the school. The took the kids out of the school and placed them around town in portable classrooms, some in a home. Six classes have been meeting 

### in
the school gymnasium. The others have been meeting in portable trailers and a private home. The extra classes, like physical education, music and art, of course, have been suspended, and the school officials don't yet know when the students will return (0 their classrooms.
PCBs leaking from light fixtures in a school that is in disrepair--this happens to be on an Indian reservation where, incidentally, in 9 months, 48 teenagers attempted suicide. In the last 9 months, 48 attempted suicides, 6 of which were successful.

If I sound a little angry about this, I am. Every single year I have come to the floor of the Senate to talk about this problem, and these kids go to school in conditions for which we ought to be ashamed. This Congress can do something about it, and the budget process is a process in which we make decisions. If someone stands up here and says, 'No, school construction doesn't count because we have other priorities,' I ask them, 'What is your priority ifit is not your children?' By 'your children,' I mean this country's children.
All across this country, when our kids go to school, I hope every parent wants their child to walk into a school that is safe, secure, and in good repair. I defy anybody in this Chamber to stand up and say to me that kids who go to school where sewer gas leaks into the classrooms and they have to move kids out of those classrooms because of the stench of sewer gas, I defy anybody to say it is a good thing for kids. If it is not a good thing for kids, and we know it is going on around this country--and aneedotically we sec it in a GAO report and other investigations--thenlet's decide we want to do something about it. The question isn't whether, the question is what.
Senator Moseley-Braun has made a proposal. Her proposal is modest. I suspect it will be voted down. It will be voted down because we have people who construct the budget and say, 'Here are our priorities; this is what we want to spend money on, and it doesn't include this.'
The amount of school repairs necessary in this country last year--3 percent of the funds available to meet the needs of school repairs was allocated to the State and local governments last year. If this Congress doesn't have the nerve and the will to sayan behalf of our kids that you matter, this is a problem we know we can fix and we are going to put in our budget the provisions that allow us to say to kids, 'We're going to invest in your young lives,' if this



# file://C:\Documents and Settings'jhsmith'My Documents\MyFiles\PCB ANPR\Electronic V... 2/3/2010

# View Appearance I 

# C-SPAN Congressional Chronicle, Created by Cable. Offered as a Pu...

Congress doesn't have the capability to do that. then there is something. in my judgment. fundamentally wrong with the priorities we have established for public spending.
I said yesterday that everybody in this Chamber will be dead in 100years. Everybody. Nobody will be around here feeling good, working. They will all be dead. We will all be dead. Only historians will evaluate through our budget, by looking back at the budget process in this Congress, the 105th Congress, what were our values; what did we think was important; what did we decide to invest in; what did we think would improve this country.
I hope historians will not look back at us and say,.'Well, oh, they had discussions about a terrible deplorable condition in some schools in their country, but they decided not to invest in schools, because, somehow, schools took a backseat, schools were in second place to a range of other priorities, some of them very strange priorities.'
I hope historians will say that this Congress, yes, in tight fiscal times decided that one of the most important investments they could make in America was to make a good investment in the education of our kids.
No kid in this country can go to school and learn the way we expect children to be able to learn unless those schools are in decent repair. They must be safe, in decent repair, good places of learning, You have to have a teacher who knows how to teach, a student who is willing to learn, and a parent involved in that education. When you have that at work and have invested in good school facilities that are necessary to make that take place, then we will have done our job as a country. I wanted to come and say Senator Moseley-Braun has offered an amendment that is very, very important. I can think of a thousand reasons why people will stand up and say they are against it. None of them are good. Mark Twain was once asked to debate-d have told my colleagues this before. He said, 'Ofcourse.'
'We've not told you the subject.'
He said, 'Doesn't matter, as long as I can take the negative side; that takes no preparation.'

It takes very little preparation to oppose. The Senator from Illinois has proposed something that ought to rank right at the top of the list of what is important for this country. When we vote today, I hope the American people who listen to this debate will call the offices and say, 'We agree that this represents the first priority for the Congress, thc first priority for this country, to invest in the lives and education of the American children.'

Me.President, I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of

a quorum. Congressional Chronicle software (C) National Cable Satellite Company 2009, The video and text of the congressional proceedings are in the public domain.

# Page 3 of3

file://C:\Documents and Settings\jhsmith\My Documents\MyFiles\PCB ANPR\Electronic V... 2/3/2010