I have a great deal of respect and admiration for people who put themselves on the line.
Major Owens
People didn't always see a person with a disability who had to use a ramp or elevator as people who have been given unnecessary privileges. But I run into that often now. People are saying, 'Why do we have to go to great expense for these people?'
It's a sad day when the leaders of the free world engage in such deception and trickery. I voted against this unnecessary war and will continue to argue that the best way to support our troops is to bring them home.
It is very difficult to get legislation passed. But then the danger always is that you have no power at all if you do not exercise constant power.
What is our greatest enemy? Segregation.
Education technology and school construction go together. Modernization, updating education facilities, and making a capital investment in education are all included.
Competition is such a virtue, and everybody's so busy competing, they have no time for compassion.
The first place to start is on enforcement. We who got the ADA passed did the hard part, the heavy lifting.
We hope that the elected officials will respond positively to a ground swell of letters, phone calls, e-mails and visits from parents. The law clearly states that the responsibility for giving a sound basic education to our children lies with New York State.
I would like to spend my next two years showing how the aim of making technology available to every young person can be built into the effort to make our nation more secure. That is my latest concern and what I will be pushing over the next two years.
High gas prices are eating away at consumer's disposal income and could lead to a further economic downturn, especially for those whose livelihood depend on gasoline and diesel fuel.
The problem was just a mean attitude that festers and has to be challenged.
We need to get ready for a world where terrorism will not ever fully go away.
Our government just won't enforce civil rights laws. The laws will be ignored.
In preparation for it, we need to have folks who are trained, we need facilities, equipment and supplies, that are going to be built into our society, and we are going to spend a lot of money on it.
Excitement in education and student productivity, the ability to get a result that you want from students, go together and cannot be separated.
You have no power at all if you do not exercise constant power.
There's a whole set of values, spawned by the vocal and highly visible Republicans, that appeal to the worst in people. Our society is moving in that direction.
Even if gas prices fall, consumers will continue to be gouged at the pump the only thing that we can be sure rises faster that the price of gasoline is the skyrocketing profits of oil companies.
Those involved in the program are interested in how to use photography, videos, the Internet, film, and anything related to communications and transmission of information in the most up-to-date modern ways.
We can not wait until we have enough trained people willing to work at a teacher's salary and under conditions imposed upon teachers in order to improve what happens in the classroom.
I think some combined pressure could go a long way, could establish the fact that this legislation did pass and we mean business by it. We mean to have it enforced, we mean to have it become effective.
There's a kind of sick security some people get out of keeping away from people with disabilities. They are running away from any situation that's not totally pure and all-American and that requires them to do any thinking.
I will continue my activities related to education in one way or another. I certainly would have at the top my agenda, with respect to education, the need to do much better with modern educational technology.
We can close the gap and improve what happens in the classroom by using educational technology that is the same high quality everywhere.
Children are already accustomed to a world that moves faster and is more exciting than anything a teacher in front of a classroom can do.
The ownership of computers in the home is far less than the statistics show, because usually when the computer breaks down once, that is the end of it for a long, long time. They do not have the money or incentive to get the computer repaired.
I do not think we are ever going to be able to, for a long time, get the kind of quality of school personnel that we need in our schools, especially in the areas of science and math. One of the answers to that problem is to use more educational technology.
Washington has been ignoring this issue for too long.
Education technology is very important because we have a massive challenge in public schools.
He testified that when you looked at it through the eyes of 'let's do it', the costs were very small. They were less than they'd had to spend to host a convention of transportation executives. The cost was not that great.
It was the best route to get folks to understand segregation fast. Civil rights and women's rights had a clear history. Making the transition to rights for people with disabilities became easier because we had the history of the other two.
People's lives have to change as a result of this legislation.
Technology tools such as laptops are the kind of help that we need. A program that provides laptops for all youngsters would close a gap that most of us are not aware of, or will not admit to, which is a tremendous gap in the poor communities.
The kind of society which we still have is maybe, in some cases, getting worse. Competition is becoming a virtue. Intense competition drives people to go more and more into self-interest. Even to see other folks as competition.
The whole community of people with disabilities was alive, politically alive. I give Justin Dart credit for that. He traveled to every state in the country. He really made people with disabilities understand that they had some political power.
Therefore, you are not training young people for the world of today and the world of tomorrow unless you are doing proven technology training. That is one of the reasons I'm so concerned.
We can do it better, more consistently, and in the end, it will cost us less because the students that we produce will be superior to those without technology experience.
