Second, since there are more students and there will be more teachers, there must be more classrooms. So I will propose a school construction tax cut to help communities modernize and build new schools. Third, I will promote a national effort to help schools that follow the lead of the Chicago system in ending social promotion, but helping students with summer school and other programs to give them the tools they need to get ahead. All these steps will help our children get the future they deserve. And that's why what we're announcing here is so important as well.
Every child needs someplace to go after school.
My balanced budget plan includes a national initiative to spark private sector and local community efforts to provide after-school care, as the Secretary of Education said, to half a million more children. There is this sort of assumption that everybody that gets in trouble when they're young has just already been abandoned. That's not true. Most of the kids that get in trouble get in trouble after school closes and before their parents get home from work. So in the adolescent years and the later years this is profoundly important to try to give kids something to say yes to and something positive to do.