Clinton Finds Metaphor for School Plea

President Clinton enlisted the children of an impoverished New Orleans middle school Monday in his latest battle with Congress, using their tumbledown campus as a metaphor for the impact that federal spending cuts would have in the classroom.

With the government’s fiscal year drawing to a close at midnight Thursday and Clinton ready to veto seven of the 13 appropriation bills that pay for government operations, the president sought to contrast the nation’s sound economic footing and the budget surplus with the deteriorating conditions of aging school buildings and the triage-like decisions facing educators.

On the day he announced in Washington that the federal budget surplus in 1999 would be $115 billion, Clinton asked a gathering here: “What are we going to do with our prosperity? You know we’ve got a lot of challenges out there. And you know as well as I do that the modern economy requires more education from all people.”

At its heart, the message the president is taking around the country draws a line: On one side, as he presents it, is his plan to boost spending on education and shore up Social Security and Medicare. On the other sits a Republican majority in Congress that has proposed cutting spending and giving the nation a large tax cut.

Speaking from a stage erected on the cracked, sun-baked blacktop outside the Sophie B. Wright Middle School on the edge of the city’s Garden District, Clinton chastised House Republicans for advancing a plan that he said would eliminate funding for the expansion of the nation’s teachers’ corps and money that he has sought for construction or modernization of 6,000 schools across the country.

“It would deny access to hundreds of thousands of children to after-school programs, so important to improving learning and keeping that juvenile crime rate down--keep kids in school, off the street and out of trouble,” said the president, standing before a group of students from the Wright school. “We have to demand more of our schools and invest more in them.”

The General Accounting Office, the congressional investigative agency, has found that 25,000 school buildings--about one-third of the nation’s public schools--need extensive repair or replacement.

The target of the president’s criticism is a spending bill approved by House subcommittees last week providing money for the departments of Labor, Education and Health and Human Services.

The White House complained that the spending plan would provide no money to reduce the size of classes. Clinton’s budget proposal would help local school districts hire an additional 8,000 teachers.

Clinton would pay for the modernization of up to 6,000 schools with $24.8 billion in tax credit bonds. Local school boards would issue the bonds and the interest they pay would earn federal tax credits for investors at a five-year cost to the federal treasury of $3.7 billion. A separate Republican plan would pay for work in no more than 644 schools, the White House said.

House Republicans, meanwhile, seeking to avert a government shutdown when the fiscal year expires Thursday, unveiled stopgap funding legislation Monday designed to continue government for another three weeks while lawmakers complete action on appropriation bills.

The temporary funding measure essentially would extend the current year’s appropriations intact without any of the structural changes that Congress has made in the money bills it has passed for fiscal year 2000, which begins Friday.

Clinton had grudgingly acquiesced to the three-week hiatus, which would give GOP leaders time to finish work on the major appropriation bills still bottled up in Congress so lawmakers can adjourn at the end of October as the leadership has hoped.

But White House Budget Director Jacob Lew warned that the president would not go along with any long-term renewal of the continuing resolution, as the measure is called, once the three-week period is over. Clinton wants to negotiate with lawmakers over the money bills.

Times staff writer Art Pine in Washington contributed to this story.