Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2004-Continued

DEPARTMENTS OF LABOR, HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES, AND EDUCATION, AND RELATED AGENCIES APPROPRIATIONS ACT, 2004—CONTINUED

Ms. COLLINS. Mr. President, I rise today to comment on two of the amendments that I am pleased to join my colleagues in cosponsoring. First, let me acknowledge the hard work of Senator Specter and Senator Harkin in shaping this bill. There are so many important priorities. They have done a very good job.

The amendments I have cosponsored have to do with education spending. First, I think it is important that all of the Members of this body acknowledge and recognize that under President Bush's leadership we have invested unprecedented amounts of Federal funding to improve the education of our children. We should never forget that fact. In fact, President Bush's budgets are 60 percent higher for education funding than the budgets presented under President Clinton. Nevertheless, there are a couple of areas where I think we can do even better and make a real difference.

AMENDMENT NO. 1566

For this reason, I have been very pleased to join my colleague from Massachusetts in offering an amendment to the bill to provide additional funding for higher education.

Our system of higher education is in many ways the envy of the world, but its benefits today have not been distributed equally to all Americans. As tuition rises, the road to higher education in America gets steeper and harder to climb for low- and middle-income families.

In 1979, a student in the top quartile of family income was four times more likely to obtain a baccalaureate degree by age 24 than a student from the bottom quartile. That discrepancy has grown by an additional 70 percent by graduation day for the class of 2001.

Tuition fees at 4-year public colleges have increased by 40 percent over the past decade. Everyone is familiar with the pressures State budgets are under, and that, too, has caused more pressure on the tuition at public universities and colleges.
At the same time, the value of Pell grants has declined by nearly half over the last 20 years. Today, Pell grants cover only 40 percent of the average fixed costs at 4-year public colleges whereas 20 years ago the Pell grant covered more than 80 percent of public college expenses.

From my experience in working at a Maine college before my election to the Senate, I know how critical Pell grants and other forms of Federal financial aid are in opening the doors of educational opportunity to many students. In fact, at Husson College where I worked, 85 percent of the students were reliant on Pell grants and student loans to finance their college education. Without that assistance, they simply would not be able to afford higher education.

I found more and more of our students are graduating with a mound of debt because of that change in ratio. It used to be that Pell grants and other forms of assistance covered most of the costs of a college education. Now, they cover far less and thus our students are forced to take out more and more and greater and greater amounts of loans to finance their education.
I am not saying education should be paid for the students, but we need to strike the right balance or else the doors of higher education and, thus, economic opportunity will be slammed shut for far too many low-income families.

Therefore, our amendment provides $2.2 billion to help fund crucial higher education programs including Pell grants, the SEOG, Work-Study, Perkins loans, the LEAP program, GEAR UP, and last but not least, the TRIO programs. The Kennedy-Collins amendment would provide desperately needed funding to increase the maximum Pell grant award. Our amendment provides a $450 increase in the maximum Pell grant and increases Pell grants to approximately 4.8 million students with a median family income of only $15,200. A Pell grant makes all the difference to these low-income families. It makes the difference between their children having economic opportunity, being able to pursue an education that is so necessary for a brighter future, that is necessary to participate in the American dream.

We can take this step, we can provide this $450 increase in Pell grants to these low-income children. In my State of Maine, this amendment results in an increase of $6.3 million in Pell grant aid.

I also want to talk about the importance of this amendment and the significant increases for other student-oriented programs. Again, I commend the committee and subcommittee chairmen for their hard work in bringing education spending up to unprecedented levels.

There is a program that I believe is so important to expanding opportunity for so many students. That is the TRIO Program. Our amendment provides a $160 million increase. The TRIO programs may be better known to many of my colleagues as Upward Bound, for example. That is an example of the TRIO programs. They help first-generation college students and low-income students get on the right track and begin to think about higher education as something that should be part of their lives.

I have talked to many students in Maine whose parents did not have the advantage of higher education. They told me that prior to participating in the TRIO programs, they just did not realize that college could be part of their lives. The TRIO programs exposed them to higher education, encouraged them, counseled them, helped them afford SATs, for example. It makes a difference. It truly changes the lives of so many students who come from families with absolutely no experience in higher education.

We have proposed to increase the funding for TRIO programs as well as for the GEAR UP and LEAP program which are aimed at younger children. The sooner we get students interested in higher education, the better. These programs change lives for the better. I hope we can help keep the doors of higher education open to all qualified students no matter their financial needs.

AMENDMENT NO. 1568

I am also very pleased to be a cosponsor of an amendment offered by Senator Daschle and Senator Conrad that would increase the funding for the Rural Education Achievement Program. This program I authored along with Senator Conrad as part of the No Child Left Behind Act.

Again, I acknowledge the tremendous efforts of the chairman, Senator Specter, on behalf of rural schools. The administration's budget, I am sad to say, eliminated funding altogether for the Rural Education Achievement Program. Senator Specter was able to restore this funding, which I deeply appreciate. It is essentially flat funded, however, and I would like to see an increase.

Our rural schools—and in Maine, that is 56 percent of the school districts in the State—need help in meeting the mandates of the No Child Left Behind Act. Children in small rural school districts deserve the same educational opportunities as their more urban counterparts.

We enacted the Rural Education Achievement Program to respond to two problems. First, smaller school districts do not have the grant writers and the other resources to compete for Federal grants the way the larger, more urban school districts do. Second, they often receive so little funding under the formula programs that it is not sufficient to accomplish the goals of those programs.

So the concept behind the Rural Education Achievement Program was to give more funding for rural schools, that they would not have to go through an elaborate grant-writing process, and to give them the flexibility of combining funding streams so they could have the funds available that would make a difference.

Let me give a couple of examples. In Jackman, ME, for example, a small community in western Maine, last year the school district received $16,000 in REAP funding in the Rural Education Achievement Program. The superintendent plans to use that money to support technology in the classroom and teacher training. There are other examples. In the Bradley School District in Penobscot County, ME, with 104 students, they received $21,000 through the Rural Education Achievement Program. The total Federal formula funding under ESEA going to this small school district will be about $25,000 this year.
That is enough to allow Bradley the flexibility to hire a part-time reading specialist to meet the mandates of No Child Left Behind, to update computer systems, or provide some extended-day learning opportunities.

With the increased challenges of No Child Left Behind, our Nation's rural school districts need the additional financial resources and the flexibility provided by the rural education program now more than ever.

I hope my colleagues will join me in supporting this amendment as well.