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<DOC>
[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents]
[frwais.access.gpo.gov]
[Page 2276-2277]
Monday, October 9, 2000
Volume 36--Number 40
Pages 2269-2347
Week Ending Friday, October 6, 2000
Proclamation 7348--National Domestic Violence Awareness Month, 2000
September 29, 2000
By the President of the United States
of America
A Proclamation
Domestic violence transcends all ethnic, racial, and socioeconomic
boundaries. Its perpetrators abuse their victims both physically and
mentally, and the effects of their attacks are far-reaching--weakening
the very core of our communities. Domestic violence is particularly
devastating because it so often occurs in the privacy of the home, which
is meant to be a place of shelter and security. During the month of
October, all Americans should contemplate the scars that domestic
violence leaves on our society and what each of us can do to prevent it.
[[Page 2277]]
Because domestic violence usually takes place in private, many
Americans may not realize how widespread it is. According to the
National Violence Against Women Survey, conducted jointly by the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institute of
Justice, each year in the United States approximately 1.5 million women
are raped and/or physically assaulted by their current or former
husbands, partners, or boyfriends. Many of these women are victimized
more than once over the course of a year. As unsettling as these
statistics are, it is also disturbing to realize that the children of
battered women frequently witness these attacks, thus becoming victims
themselves.
My Administration has worked hard to reduce domestic violence in our
Nation and to assist victims and their families. The cornerstone of our
efforts has been the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), which the
Congress passed with bipartisan support in 1994 and which I signed into
law as part of our comprehensive crime control bill. This important
piece of legislation, which contains a broad array of ground-breaking
measures to combat violence against women, combines tough penalties with
programs to prosecute offenders and provide assistance to women who are
survivors of violence.
In the 6 years since I signed VAWA into law, the legislation has
provided more than $1.6 billion to support prosecutors, law enforcement
officials, courts, victim advocates, and intervention efforts. We have
quadrupled funding for battered women's shelters, created the National
Domestic Violence Hotline, and supported community outreach and
prevention programs, children's counseling, and child protection
services. The Department of Justice has awarded more than 900
discretionary grants and 280 STOP (Services, Training, Officers,
Prosecutors) Violence Against Women formula grants to help State,
tribal, and local governments and community-based organizations
establish specialized domestic violence and sexual assault units, train
personnel, enforce laws, develop policies, assist victims of violence,
and hold abusers accountable.
These VAWA programs are making a difference across the country. A
recent report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics shows that the number
of women experiencing violence at the hands of an intimate partner
declined 21 percent from 1993 to 1998. I call on the Congress to
reauthorize and strengthen VAWA so that we may continue to build on the
progress we have made in combating domestic violence in our Nation.
Through VAWA and other initiatives and programs, we are striving to
create a responsive legal system in American communities that not only
prevents domestic violence and sexual assault, but also ensures that
every victim has immediate access to helpful information and emergency
assistance. By taking strong public action against this crime, we are
creating a society that promotes strong values, fosters a safe, loving
home environment for every family, and refuses to tolerate domestic
violence in any form.
Now, Therefore, I, William J. Clinton, President of the United
States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the
Constitution and laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim October
2000 as National Domestic Violence Awareness Month. I call upon
government officials, law enforcement agencies, health professionals,
educators, community leaders, and the American people to join together
to end the domestic violence that threatens so many of our people.
In Witness Whereof, I have hereunto set my hand this twenty-ninth
day of September, in the year of our Lord two thousand, and of the
Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and twenty-
fifth.
William J. Clinton
[Filed with the Office of the Federal Register, 8:45 a.m., October 3,
2000]
Note: This proclamation was released by the Office of the Press
Secretary on October 2, and it was published in the Federal Register on
October 4.
<DOC>
[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents]
[frwais.access.gpo.gov]
[Page 2277-2281]
Monday, October 9, 2000
Volume 36--Number 40
Pages 2269-2347
Week Ending Friday, October 6, 2000
Remarks on the Student Loan Program and Student Assistance
October 2, 2000
Give her another hand. Wasn't she great? [Applause] Good job. Thank
you. You know, I thought I'd be having withdrawal today,
[[Page 2278]]
after the Olympics--[laughter]--and I was wondering what I would do for
an encore, and the answer was, meet Raquel. [Laughter] Thank you very
much for being here and for your example.
And Secretary Riley, to you and to all these wonderful people at the
Department of Education, I thank you for the astonishing work you've
done on the student loan program and on student assistance, generally.
When I ran for President in 1991, late 1991 and 1992, I talked a lot
about redoing the student loan program and increasing access to
financial assistance through grants, work study, tax credits, and an
improved student loan program. I'll never forget one night; it was about
1990, I think. I was then serving as Governor of my home State, and I
was up in Fayetteville, Arkansas, which is the home of the University of
Arkansas. And a friend of mine and I went out to a coffee shop to have a
cup of coffee.
And I did what I always do; I went around and shook hands with
everybody at all the tables in there. [Laughter] And there were three
young students there having coffee, so I sat down and started talking to
them. Two of them were planning to drop out of school. They were already
in college--I'll never forget this. And I asked them why in the world
they would do that, given the fact that the economy that they would live
in for their adult lives put a higher premium on education than ever
before.
And both of them said they had to go ahead and get out and work for
a couple of years because they knew they could not meet their student
loan repayment schedule. And they didn't want to take the money and not
be able to pay it back. And it had a searing impact on me. So I said,
``Surely, these people are the exception to the rule,'' so I started
nosing around and come to find out there were a lot of people like this.
And that's basically how we got into the idea of the direct student
loan with the option to repay as a percentage of your income. I also
found a lot of young people who wanted to be teachers, like Raquel, or
police officers or nurses, who instead were taking jobs that they found
less rewarding but paid more money so they could meet their loan
repayment schedule.
The background to all these things that we're going to talk about
here in a minute, for me at least, came alive through the stories of
young people I met. And then when I went around the country in 1992, I
met more and more and more of them. So, Raquel, I'm grateful to you, but
I'm also grateful to all those young people, many whose names I don't
even know, who took the time to share their stories and tell me about
the personal challenges they faced. And it was very important to me
because I never could have gotten through college and law school without
loans and grants and jobs. And I wanted everybody else to have those
opportunities, as well.
Now, one of the big problems we faced in 1993, when I took office,
is that the student loan program itself was in danger because its
credibility, its very financial underpinnings were threatened by a very
high default rate. Nearly one in four students was failing, for a
variety of reasons, to repay their student loans. And yet, again I say,
we all knew that we needed more people going on to college, not fewer
people. So the trick was how to figure out how to get more people to go
to college and do a better job of collecting on the student loans and
get people to be more responsible in discharging their student loans.
Since 1993, as Secretary Riley said, we have more than doubled our
investment in student aid. We've increased Pell grants; expanded work-
study slots from 700,000 to a million; created AmeriCorps, which has now
given more than 150,000 young people a chance to earn money for college
while serving in our communities; created education IRA's, the $1,500
HOPE scholarship tax credit for the first 2 years of college, and then a
lifelong learning credit for the junior and senior years and for
graduate school. More than 5 million families already have taken
advantage of the HOPE scholarship tax credit in '98 and '99.
We made it easier and cheaper to get loans and for students now to
pay them back as a percentage of their future income, and you heard
Raquel talking about that.
The Direct Student Loan Program we started, also by fostering
competition, have saved students more than $9 billion in loan repayment
costs, just from lower interest
[[Page 2279]]
rates alone. Taken together, these actions amount to the largest
increases in college access and opportunity since the passage of the GI
bill after World War II. And we can now say to every student in America,
``The money is there. You can actually go on to college.'' This is
profoundly important.
Students are getting the message; two-thirds of them are now going
to college. That's up more than 10 percent over the last few years. We
have also tried, as I said, to increase responsibility for repaying
these loans. Otherwise, the whole thing would be undermined over the
long run. And here's what the Department of Education did, and again,
it's just another example of Secretary Riley's sterling leadership and
the great qualities of the people there. But here's what they
essentially did to reduce the student loan default rate.
First, identified more than 800 schools with consistently high
default rates that were obviously not serving their students, and they
were eliminated from the program.
Second, more flexible repayment schedules were offered. Students no
longer have to default on their loans simply because they're going
through a period in their lives where they don't have all the resources
they need to make full repayments.
Third, we slashed the cost of the loans, themselves, so it's more
affordable to pay them back. A typical $10,000 student loan today costs
$1,300 less in fees and interest costs than it did 8 years ago. That's
astonishing--$1,300 less on a $10,000 loan. I guess that sort of
explains why some people thought our attempts to establish this program
so--[laughter]--that $1,300 was going somewhere. [Laughter]
Fourth, students are borrowing less than they otherwise would have
because of the increases in Pell grants, HOPE scholarships, and other
tax credits, and the work-study aid and other student aid. And finally,
of course, a stronger economy has made it easier for students to repay
their loans.
But listen to this. Thanks to all these factors, today, the student
loan default rate has been cut by two-thirds--actually, more than two-
thirds. When I took office, the default rate was 22.4 percent; today, it
is 6.9 percent. Here's a really impressive thing: This is the lowest
default rate in the history of the student loan program, and it has been
achieved while tripling the number of loans given every year. Normally,
you think if you give more loans, you'll be loaning more at the margin
of risk. This is an astonishing achievement. And Secretary Riley, you
should be very proud. I thank your whole team. This is an amazing,
amazing thing.
By cutting defaults, increasing collections, and making the system
more competitive, we have saved taxpayers and students--the students
have saved $9 billion, and the taxpayers have saved twice that much, $18
billion, because of the reduction in student loan defaults since 1993.
That is very good news for the American people, a total of $27 billion
in savings.
Let me say that this lesson--invest more and have more
accountability and have the programs work based on how the real world,
the real lives of these students is unfolding--that's the kind of thing
I think we ought to do in education generally. And I'd like to say just
a few words about the education budget and priorities now pending before
the Congress.
For more than 7 years, we've tried to invest more in our schools, in
more teachers, smaller classes, more Head Start, more after-school and
summer school programs, hooking up 95 percent of the schools to the
Internet. We've also demanded more from our schools: higher standards,
more accountability for results, more responsibility for turning around
failing schools. Secretary Riley points out when we took office, there
were only about 14 States with real standards and a core curriculum.
Today, there are 49 States. And we got a change in the Federal law to
require the States to identify their failing schools and have strategies
to turn them around.
We wanted to go further, in terms of the standards for the tests
that the students take, through the nonpartisan national association for
student testing, called NAGB. And we also would like to pass legislation
that requires States to turn around the failing schools in a fixed
amount of time or shut them down or put them under new management.
[[Page 2280]]
But we have made a lot of progress. Math and reading scores are
rising across America--some of the greatest gains in some of the most
disadvantaged schools. The number of students taking advanced placement
courses has risen by two-thirds in 8 years: among Hispanic students, by
about 300 percent; among African-American students, by about 500
percent--taking advance placement courses. College entrance exam scores
are rising, even as more students from more disadvantaged backgrounds
take the test. That is not an education recession. That is an education
revival.
But on the other hand, no serious person believes that American
education is where it ought to be. We have the largest and most diverse
student body in the history of our country. We have what is immensely
frustrating to me, which is evidence that every problem in American
education has been solved by somebody, somewhere, but we have still,
after almost 20 years of serious effort in education reform, not
succeeded in institutionalizing what works in one or two schools right
across a school district or right across a State.
So there are lots and lots of challenges still out there. And what I
believe we should be doing is to emphasize further changes in the
direction we have been moving. We need more investment, and we need more
accountability. And we need to understand the central importance of
teachers, of principals, of modern facilities, and of genuine, effective
accountability systems.
Now, that's my problem with the present congressional budget. The
majority in Congress is pushing a budget that would neither increase
investment or accountability. It abandons the bipartisan commitment we
made just last year to hire 100,000 new highly qualified teachers to
reduce class size in the early grades. It fails to guarantee investments
in building or modernizing classrooms, when we know that the
construction and repair deficit in America's classrooms is over $120
billion today. It shortchanges investment in after-school programs, in
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