Remarks by Mrs. Laura Bush at the "Education Leadership Symposium"

Thank you very much, Gerald. Thank you all. Thanks so much. Well, I’m the wrap-up speaker, and I’m going to be quick, so everyone can eat — I know you’re hungry, I am — and have a chance to visit with the people that are at your table.

This was really a really wonderful start this morning to talk about education and to have this be the very first conference of the Bush Institute, the very first one we’ve hosted. And like George already said to you, this was the perfect beginning, because this is what George ran on as governor, when he ran for governor. And this was one of his priorities when he ran for President, both in those ads that you would have seen before those elections, and then in the work that he did once he was elected.

But for me, there’s sort of a sentimental reason too, that this was first. This is my college, SMU. This is where I got a degree in education, although it was not the Annette Simmons School of Education then. That school, in fact, dissolved for some number of years, and now the Annette Simmons School is our new School of Education here at SMU. Also, Dallas was my very first classroom; I taught here at Longfellow Elementary. I taught a fourth-grade class as a 21-year-old. And I’ll have to admit, and sorry to say to SMU, I was not that prepared. But I found my way sort of as they did, as my students did. This was long before we had any sort of data other than — and some of you old teachers will remember those nice little grade books that you got. You wrote everyone’s name in by hand, then you put their grades in the little boxes that followed, and then you wrote their report cards when you averaged those grades that you put in by hand. So education has changed a lot, and I’m thrilled and excited about the Annette Simmons School of Education. And so I want to thank especially Dr. Turner for this very first summit, and for our relationship with SMU, our partnership with SMU. I also want to thank Dean David Chard in the Annette Simmons School of Education.

Thank you very much, Governor Hunt, for being part of this. Governor Hunt was a mentor to George when George was a new governor, and Governor Hunt had already started a lot of these education reform efforts in North Carolina that we then patterned a lot of our work in Texas after.

I especially want to thank Dr. Jim Guthrie and Sandy Kress, who are two of our first fellows. Dr. Guthrie is our first co-fellow with the School of Education. Right after George and I moved here, and we were talking about what we wanted to do, I went to Dean Chard, and said that I hope that one of our first co-fellows will be with the School of Education. And I told Reid Lyon, who I’d worked with since George was governor, and then when George was President, so many times on education issues. And so I’m really happy that Dr. Guthrie is our first co-fellow.

I want to thank everybody here for joining us. There are many, many friends in the room, many people that we’ve worked on education issues with for years, many people representing groups or programs that we’ve worked with — Charles Glover, who’s here from Teach for America. This is the first year that Dallas has Teach for America teachers, and we have 100, I think, or almost 100 Teach for America teachers in DISD. So thank you very much. I’m looking forward to teaching for America during Teach for America week at a Dallas school.

I think what you all saw this morning with this very first symposium is sort of the appetizer, like you’re looking at longingly on your table probably right now. This was just a very first and short symposia, a way for us to talk about what the problem is that we want to investigate and research. Longer symposia hopefully will come from this when we have more research, and we have more specific ways for us to address the problem that we talked about today. And that is the way we can develop leaders, leadership skills in principals and superintendents, and pick leaders for all of our school districts everywhere in every part of our country. But I wanted to talk about the work, other work at the Institute. Oh, and I forgot to mention, and Gerald gave me this hint — the publication date of my book is May 4th, just in case you’re interested.

But I do want to talk about another couple of conferences that are coming up. One of them, the Afghan American Women’s Council that will meet here on March 19th, again with an education focus in the way we can make sure women and girls are educated in Afghanistan. And then I think we have another fellow — is Oscar here? Did he come to the lunch? Oh, there you are. This is Oscar Morales, our co-fellow in the freedom part. George talked about the four education — global health, economics, and then freedom — the four parts of the institute, and he started a Facebook page, if I’m not mistaken. FARC No Mas in Columbia, and rallied millions of people around the world to protest the FARC. And he’s going to be talking about the way at other symposia — about the way freedom fighters, democracy advocates, and political dissidents can use the Internet to get above their tyrannical governments. And in his case, he was protesting not a government, but a movement in the country of Columbia. So thank you and welcome. We’re so glad to have you as one of our co-fellow. Thank you, Oscar.

I want to just talk very briefly about leadership in school districts and in schools. I’ve visited schools, as you all know, all over the country, and in fact, all over the world. I had that great privilege, and as George said once when we were walking into one of our many, many, many, many school visits, he said, “Have you noticed that every school in the United States has been freshly painted?” That was because, of course, every time we visited a school, they just had finished painting about 30 minutes before we got there.

But we do know that without exception, the impact of the leadership of principals and superintendents is evident in their students and in their schools. And one of the regions that I visited the most in the visited schools, even as recently as the end of January, is the Gulf Coast. After the hurricanes — Katrina, and then later Rita and Ike that just hit Galveston and devastated all of the school districts there — Wilma — every one of those hurricanes made a huge impact on our whole Gulf Coast. And for the first time really ever, school superintendents and state school officials were faced with the task of rebuilding whole school districts, every single school, especially those little Gulf Coast towns in Mississippi that lost every single school. In New Orleans, many, many schools were damaged, but there was a section of New Orleans where schools were not damaged, and so there were school buildings to use when people came back and were ready to start again. According to the Department of Education, over 1,000 public and private schools were damaged or destroyed across the Gulf Coast, sending more than 372,000 students to new classrooms all across our country in all 50 states, and today the schools are one of the Gulf Coast’s great success stories, right behind, of course, the New Orleans Saints.

But I want to tell you about one superintendent, who I visited just a few weeks after she had come back to her school district, and this is Doris Voitier, who was the school superintendent of St. Bernard Parish, which was totally flooded, and every one of her schools was flooded. She had just been appointed school superintendent a year before Hurricane Katrina, and she was in, along with the faculty, Chalmette High School, her big high school, the day of the hurricanes. Chalmette flooded 15 feet of water, went across St. Bernard Parish, and she and some of her faculty were upstairs on the second floor, and that was their — because that was one of the few several story buildings in St. Bernard Parish — that was designated as their evacuation point for people to come to, to seek refuge. So they literally hoisted people out of boats into the second floor of Chalmette. A number of people were there for almost two weeks before the waters receded, and they were able to leave. They ate food that was left over in their cafeteria. They rationed boxes of cereal that they could get out of their cafeteria before it flooded, because of course it was on the first floor — and water, clean water. One person died while they were there, and they just had to cover their body, because there was no way to get anyone out.

But anyway, she went to work as soon as the waters receded. She started redoing Chalmette High School from the top down, because the bottom was so filled with mud. She knew how important it was for students to be able to come back to their own schools. She recruited their faculty. They took a pay cut. Many of them were either living with relatives in Baton Rouge and driving the 40 miles every day, or living in FEMA trailers. They also, all of her faculty members, had lost everything, just like the school district had. I remember meeting with her with Margaret Spelling. She was trying to get the FEMA money that she would need to clean out the bottom of her school. She’d gotten the bids, all of the things she needed, and Margaret and I just said, “Hire ‘em. Tell FEMA to call us.” She didn’t have any computers; she didn’t have any working phones; she didn’t have emergency grant money. She took out the loans herself to start the cleanup teams until she knew that FEMA would help pay her bills. She secured portable classrooms herself and rented trailers, so that her teaching staff would have a place to stay. And only a few weeks after the storm, she reopened her first school, which was in temporary trailers on the parking lot, and then on the second floor of Chalmette High School, which is where all of the evacuees had been. Of more than 8,000 students who had been enrolled in her parish before the hurricane, 300 returned to the first reopened school. I think that really is a really large number, because most of those students had lost their homes as well. By August of 2007, just two years after the floods, she was now serving more than 4,000 students, and this year her school has gone up to now 5,000.

Rebuilding schools was essential to rebuilding the Gulf Coast. Families wouldn’t move back unless they had a school for their children to go to. Children couldn’t really return to a normal life until they had the routine of a school, and in many cases wanted their own schools, the one they had been in before. Students and children were traumatized all across the Gulf Coast, the ones who had stayed there during the floods. Many of them had been separated from their family members, because they’d been with a babysitter or with their grandmother or an aunt or something when the floods came, and ended up going off to a separate refugee, separate evacuation point. I love this one story. The Laura Bush Foundation is giving grants across the Gulf Coast, big grants, $50,000 to $150,000 for whole library collections for these schools as they rebuilt their libraries. But I love the stories that school librarians would tell me of how their students would finally come back months later or a year later to their own school, and the only thing they would have saved when they drove off with their family before the hurricane was their library book. They would bring it back to the school librarian, and then be wondering what their fine would be. Isn’t that so sweet?

Anyway, Doris, I think, really is the kind of leader we want. Hopefully, our leaders won’t have to have the trauma that she had, or have to rebuild a whole school district like she has. But she has those very important leadership skills. And I’ll tell you what one thing those skills required, and that’s courage. You know, she could have thrown her hands up and said no, you know, this is just too much, and I can’t do it, but she didn’t. She actually was awarded one of the Profile in Courage awards from the Kennedy Library. All of us, all of you today who were invited are invited because you have an integral role to play in the work that we’re talking about as leading researchers or scholars or teachers or administrators or foundation heads or business leaders or philanthropists. And at the Bush Institute, we want to make sure that we have the advantage of the best scholars and researchers, that we do learn from those with experience, and we partner with those who can turn this policy into action.

So every project the Institute undertakes is designed to make an impact in the real world, and our goal is to ensure in all of these symposia or all of our research and education that every child can succeed in school and in life by receiving a good education that prepares them to be able to grow up and have better opportunities as adults. We know it’s possible, and we look forward to working with each and every one of you to make it a reality. Education is the Bush Institute’s main domestic policy focus, and in the months and years to come, we’ll address other critical topics.

And I want to reassure Governor Hunt that George and I are fully engaged in everything that’s going on in the Bush Institute and will be for the rest of our lives. It will be a privilege, really, to have this partnership with SMU and with the Bush Institute and with so many of you in this room. Thank you all very much for coming. Thank you for participating, and I hope you will — you did already fill out those cards so you can put your two cents in that box, but also I hope you’ll continue to talk with the people at your table about other ways we can address both the issues of leadership and principals and superintendents and in school districts, in general, and other education policy issues that you think are critical for the Bush Institute to address. So thank you all very, very much.