Bobby Scott

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. Madam Speaker, I object to the vote on the ground that a quorum is not present and make the point of order that a quorum is not present.

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman from New York for introducing the resolution and urge my colleagues to support it. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. Madam Speaker, I yield such time as he may consume to the Chair of the Government Oversight and Reform Committee and sponsor of this resolution, the gentleman from New York (Mr. Towns).

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. I yield myself such time as I may consume. Madam Speaker, this resolution recognizes the important efforts to reduce crime in our Nation's urban areas and to support crime victims. We observed National Urban Crimes Awareness week during the second week of this month. This resolution particularly recognizes the critical role of education and prevention programs in decreasing crime. It also highlights the need for redoubling our commitment to finding alternatives for incarceration, to engaging in reentry programs for those completing their programs, and for rehabilitation programs that will help prevent crime from happening in the first place. It is important that we in Congress emphasize our commitment to reducing crime all across this country and to supporting the victims of crimes. I want to thank the gentleman from New York (Mr. Towns) for introducing this resolution, I urge my colleague to support it, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. Madam Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members have 5 legislative days to revise and extend their remarks and include extraneous material on the resolution under consideration.

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. Madam Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and agree to the concurrent resolution (H. Con. Res. 227) supporting the goals and ideals of National Urban Crimes Awareness Week, as amended.

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. I want to thank the gentleman from Connecticut and the gentleman from Texas for their work on this bill. I urge my colleagues to support the legislation, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. Madam Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. Madam Speaker, I yield such time as he may consume to the sponsor of Billy's Law, the gentleman from Connecticut (Mr. Murphy).

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. I yield myself such time as I may consume. Madam Speaker, the Help Find the Missing Act, or Billy's Law, will help families of missing persons find their loved ones by strengthening Federal databases about missing persons and unidentified remains. Every year, tens of thousands of Americans go missing and are never found. In the subcommittee we heard moving testimony from Ms. Janice Smolinski, whose son, Billy, went missing in 2004. While she has not found her son, she has dedicated her life to improving the system for others, including highlighting the need to strengthen and expand access to our missing persons databases. I thank her for her dedication to this worthy cause. Billy's Law will facilitate the sharing of information between the FBI's NCIC databases and the NamUs databases recently established by the National Institute of Justice. Facilitating information-sharing between those two databases will assist the public, medical examiners, and coroners in looking for missing persons and identifying remains. Billy's Law also authorizes grants for personnel, technology, and training to help States submit data to NCIC and NamUs. These grants will strengthen the system by providing an incentive for States to provide critical information to the databases shortly after missing person cases are reported. This bill is strongly supported by the Department of Justice. And I would like to commend our colleagues, the gentleman from Connecticut (Mr. Murphy) and the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Poe), for their hard work on this piece of legislation. I strongly urge my colleagues to support H.R. 3695. I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. Madam Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members have 5 legislative days to revise and extend their remarks and include extraneous material on the bill under consideration.

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. Madam Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and pass the bill (H.R. 3695) to authorize funding for, and increase accessibility to, the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, to facilitate data sharing between such system and the National Crime Information Center database of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, to provide incentive grants to help facilitate reporting to such systems, and for other purposes, as amended.

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. Madam Speaker, I am honored to rise on behalf of myself, Congressman Rob Wittman and Congressman Glenn Nye to call attention to a group of young students from Hampton, Virginia, who have once again distinguished themselves, their school, their community and the Commonwealth of Virginia. For the second consecutive year, the Phoebus High School Phantoms football team had a remarkable season. On December 12, the Phoebus High School Phantoms won their fifth state football championship this decade, defeating Stone Bridge High School of Ashburn 15-10, at Scott Stadium in Charlottesville, Virginia. Taking over from coach Bill Dee, new head coach Stan Sexton led the Phantoms another 15-0 season. Their winning streak now stands at 30 wins. No other Group AAA school has won back-to-back championships since Phoebus did it in 2001 and 2002; now Phoebus has done it again. This has truly been Phoebus' decade in football, having won five state championships this decade with a record of 120-12 (.909). No other AAA school has won more than 102 games. This latest championship is just another accolade for the City of Hampton's youngest school, founded in 1975. Phoebus High's legacy of excellence is not limited to just the field of athletics. Under the Direction of Principal Robert Johnson, the Phoebus faculty seeks to inspire students to strive for excellence and achievement in the classroom, in their extracurricular activities and in their communities. Phoebus has two innovative programs that expand the learning experience outside of the traditional classroom. Phoebus hosts the Hampton School Division's Center for High Technology. This magnet career academy includes classes in pre-engineering, design and 2 drafting, and Cisco network administration, preparing students for college classes and jobs in the technology sector. Phoebus is also home to the Blue Phantom Inn. This student-run restaurant gives students an opportunity to develop their culinary arts skills, and was nationally recognized in Southern Living magazine. The Phantom's excellence in football is also characteristic of the quality of athletics in the Peninsula District of Virginia. Phoebus High School's championship this year marked the 11th time in the last fifteen years that a Peninsula District team has won a state title in football. To quote from our hometown newspaper, the Daily Press, ``High school football on the Peninsula is championship football.'' We would like to extend our enthusiastic congratulations to Coach Stan Sexton, his coaching staff and all of the players on the Phoebus High School Phantoms, the 2008 and 2009 Group AAA Division 5 Virginia High School League state football champions.

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. I want to thank the gentlewoman from Wisconsin for her hard work. She has benefited from the TRIO Program, so she knows firsthand as I do, as a counselor in college. I spent 3 years as a counselor in the Upward Bound Program, noticing the profound change from the beginning of the program to the end of the program. We need to make sure these opportunities and this guidance is made available to all students to make sure they can get into college and then to support services once they get there so that they can graduate. These are important programs. I thank the gentlelady for organizing this Special Order and I thank the gentlelady from Texas for joining us.

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. I would agree. And I have introduced, as you know, the Youth Promise Act, which looks at a comprehensive approach to investing in our young people, getting them on the right track, keeping them on the right track rather than waiting for them to drop out of school, mess up, and then spend all the money on incarceration. If we take a comprehensive approach, we have found that you are more likely to save money in the long run--indeed, certainly even in the short run. Comprehensive approaches to juvenile crime, one in Pennsylvania where they spent $60 million investing in young people--in a couple of years they figured they saved $300 million. Those kinds of results happen all over the country when you take a comprehensive approach, making sure young people can get on the right track and stay on the right track and get out of what the Children's Defense Fund calls the cradle-to-prison pipeline and get into the cradle-to-college or cradle-to-workforce pipelines. Those pipelines, the college and workforce pipelines, are actually cheaper to construct than a cradle- to-prison pipeline where you spend huge sums of money locking people up. You don't get the benefit of the increased earnings; you just end up spending all the money on crime and welfare. So if we make the right investments in getting young people on the right track and keeping them on the right track, we not only have a better society, but the budget will look better.

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. And if we don't make the investments that we're talking about today, this may be the first generation that has a lower achievement of education than their previous generation. Right now, many children of college-educated parents are not going to college. We are very close to having this generation less educated than last. That will be the first time in American history that that has ever taken place.

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. There are direct consequences of spending more money on education, one of which is that the average income of those who you have invested in, the average income will go up, better known from a budget perspective as more taxable income. And so those that you invest in and have more taxable income will be able to help fund the government. That is on the plus side. On the minus side, if you do not educate the people, they are much more likely to be involved in crime and welfare, better known as expenditures. So instead of getting more revenue, you end up with more expenditures. So we need to make sure that we make these investments in education so more and more of our students go on to college. And we know what works. We know that TRIO works. The TRIO programs, the Talent Search, Upward Bound, Upward Bound Math-Science, and Veterans Upward Bound all help students think about college and get them on track to college. The Student Support Services, Educational Opportunity Centers, and the Ronald E. McNair Postbaccalaureate Achievement Programs help students once they get to college. They are involved in those programs and are much more likely to graduate and complete their education, making sure they will be much more contributing members of society. And we know they work. There are currently 2,800 TRIO programs that are serving 850,000 low-income and first-generation students. Now, you can only imagine that without TRIO, many of these students wouldn't even be thinking about college. And if you just look around the country, many of these programs have waiting lists, young people that are trying to get the help of a TRIO program, but because we haven't funded them adequately, there are not enough slots and they have to languish and perhaps not get an education because they didn't get the services that they needed. We need to make sure those investments are there. If you're looking long term in the budget, we need to make sure that people are self- sufficient, not depending on government. The investments we make in education in the long-term budget perspective are investments that need to be made.

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. You mentioned two-fifths require college. But even more than that require some education past the high school level, some kind of training, some kind of education, maybe not the 4-year college but a 2-year college, or maybe some career training course so that you could learn your trade. There used to be a time where you could get a low-skilled job, keep it for 40 years and then retire. The jobs of today require continual learning, lifelong learning. You've got to be retrained. A lot of jobs have become obsolete. Instead of one job for a long time, most people will have four or five or six jobs during their careers. It's important to make sure that you can learn and you have lifelong learning so that you can keep up with the new jobs. Most, 40 percent require college, but virtually all of them, good jobs, will require some kind of education past the high school level.

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. Well, one of the things we found in our work in Education and Labor and on the Crime Subcommittee is that so many of our young people are not graduating from high school. In some States, in some schools, and they're called drop-out factories, half the children that go to those schools fail to graduate. And so it's important, if we're going to have any kind of society, that we encourage young people to go to college because at least that means they'll get through high school. If you do not pay for education, you will pay for welfare and crime. And so it's important for us, as a society, to make sure that we invest in education so we won't have as much to pay for in crime and welfare, and also, we'll have an educated workforce so that when businesses come to the community and consider moving their businesses to your community, you'll have a well-educated workforce to show off, and you'll also demonstrate that if they bring their business here, their workers will have access to a good education. So it's in everybody's best interest to have a well-educated workforce and to make the investments in education. The Pell Grants make sure that everybody can have access. A significant reduction in interest on student loans has taken place in the last few years. There are a lot of things that we're doing, and we're helping colleges. We've made significant investments in colleges and how they can help their students. There are a lot of things that we've been doing, but the main focus has got to be to get young people into college, and once they get into college, to make sure they have the support services that the TRIO programs will provide to make sure that they can actually graduate.

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. I yield.

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. When you have parents who did not go to college--and this is one of the main focuses of the TRIO Programs--they want to develop that expectation. When I was in college, I was an Upward Bound counselor, and I could see in the Upward Bound program the profound change in attitude that young people had as the summer went on. At the beginning of the summer, I remember you could ask young people, What are your plans for the future? They would start telling you their plans for the weekend. Later in the program, you'd ask, What are your plans for the future? They'd tell you what courses they needed to take in high school to make sure they could get into college, and they'd tell you the courses that they'd have to take in college in order to get into law school or into medical school. They had planned their futures a lot farther along than just the weekend. When you have a different perspective and when you start having an expectation that ``my future includes college,'' a lot of things happen. One, you are less likely to use drugs and to get caught up in delinquency because you know that will adversely affect your future. So just the fact that you're looking at a future, you will much more likely get on the right track and stay on the right track to actually achieve those goals.

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. Thank you. If the gentlelady would yield, one of the things we need to do is to make sure that we get all of our students headed toward college. You mentioned the impact of finances and the income of parents. One factor is that many parents never went to college, so there is not an expectation that their children will go to college. If your parents went to college, there is really an expectation that you are going to go to college, too. It's not a question of whether you are going to college. After you graduate from high school, it's which college are you going to go to. There is just an expectation.

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. I yield.

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. Well, we're not making enough of an investment in Pell. We need to make those investments because the cost of college is going up even more than the increases in Pell Grants. We have done a lot in Pell Grants in the last few years. After several years of no increases, we have made significant increases in Pell Grants, but the Pell Grant still does not pay as much of a portion of your education as it used to. It used to be that, with a Pell Grant, you could almost pay your entire tuition--room and board--at a State college. Now it's about 30 percent, and you've got to come up with the rest. With a Pell Grant, people back in the '60s and in the early '70s could work 15 hours a week at a little part-time job and could work their way through college. Today, even with a Pell Grant and while working 40 hours a week, it is still very difficult to work your way through college. We need to make sure that these opportunities are there. Even though you have financial access with the Pell Grants, with the student loans, and with the scholarships, you need to make sure that you have the support to get the work done. Many students will start in college and won't finish, and you'll have dropouts not only in high school but also dropouts in college. We need to make sure that they have those services. The beneficiaries of the TRIO Programs do much better in college completion than those who don't have those support services. You have the counseling, the tutorial, and the other support services that you need. They are so important, and that's why we need to make sure that the TRIO Program funding goes up as much as the funding for financial access, like Pell Grants and student loans. We have to recognize that the investments we make in education are so important and that, if we don't make these investments, we end up paying the bill anyway. I serve not only on the Education and Labor Committee, but I also serve on the Judiciary Committee, where I chair the Subcommittee on Crime. We know that there is a strong correlation between those who drop out of school and those who end up in the criminal justice system. The high school dropouts are much more likely to end up in prison. Those who graduate from high school and those who go to college are much less likely to get caught up in the criminal justice system. When you look at all of the costs of incarceration and when you look at all of the costs of affordable welfare, if we had made the investments in education to get young people on the right track and to keep them on the right track, we wouldn't have had to make those expenditures in the criminal justice and social service programs. So education is extremely important, and it is a much more intelligent use of taxpayer money--investing in education--rather than waiting for young people to drop out of school and to mess up, to join a gang and then get into a bidding war as to how much time they're going to serve in prison. I saw an article in the last couple of days in New York. For every juvenile incarcerated, they spend about $200,000 a year locking up juveniles. California had the same number--over $200,000 per year per juvenile. You can just think of what kind of education could have been provided a few years before to make sure that the young people got on the right track and stayed on the right track. So investments in education are not only good for the economy and are not only good for the community, but they actually save more money than they cost when you look at the costs of failing to educate the next generation.

Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. I will yield.