Each weekend when I go home to Tennessee , the people who elected me teach me about how we should be doing our jobs here in Washington . This isn’t a lesson they shout from the rooftops; it’s one they live by their own example, and we in Congress would be wise to follow it.

Two weeks ago, in Maryville , it was Al Gore flying a planeload of evacuees from New Orleans into one of Tennessee ’s most Republican counties. Nobody asked about anybody’s politics.  Everybody just pitched in to help.

Last weekend, members of the church where I am an elder, Westminster Presbyterian Church in Nashville , sent $80,000 and a truckload of clothes and Clorox to southern Mississippi . ``The Presbyterians are here,'' one grateful Mississippi man relayed to his friends on his cell phone to say, ``and they have Clorox.'' When the Clorox was passed out, nobody asked if anybody was a Presbyterian.

And now, this past Sunday, the headline in the Tennessean was “Private Schools Welcome Those Displaced by Katrina.”  According to the newspaper, “a growing number of private schools in Middle Tennessee . . . have volunteered to help students displaced by Katrina.  Many of them are also waiving or drastically discounting tuition and fees for these students, and some also accept evacuees from public schools.”

“These children are in crisis. They have been displaced, but they have found a home,” said the principal of Father Ryan High School who has accepted 20 students and is trying to accommodate every student who shows up. Father Ryan is waiving the $6,880 tuition, the $350 activity fee and the $500 in books for displaced students it simply calls “transfers.”

Public schools by law have to accept all children. And Tennessee ’s public schools have made room for more than 3,000 of Katrina’s displaced school children. Our public schools have been greatly helped by private schools that don’t have to accept anybody. In Tennessee , private schools have accepted at least 400 students and probably more. Especially in Memphis , where so many displaced students have gone, the willingness of private schools to accept these students is a huge help to overcrowded public schools.

According to a report on National Public Radio there are five to ten thousand of these displaced private school students in Baton Rouge  who have no school to attend. To accommodate them, the Catholic Diocese in Baton Rouge  is struggling to establish satellite schools, some located at great distances away, which these students will attend at night.

These private schools in Tennessee and elsewhere that reach out are filling a huge need because the four Louisiana parishes hit the hardest had nearly one third or 61,000 of their 187,000 students in private schools, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

That was the story and the lesson from Tennessee . The story in Washington last weekend, unfortunately, was different. According to Saturday’s Washington Post, when President Bush proposed emergency disaster legislation that would help all of Katrina’s 372,000 displaced children during the rest of this school year, the senator from Massachusetts and some teachers’ unions objected.

Senator Ted Kennedy said, “I am extremely disappointed that [the president] has proposed this relief using such a politically charged approach. This is not time for a partisan political debate on vouchers.”

I absolutely agree with that last sentence. This is not the time for a partisan political debate on vouchers. This is the time for those of us in the Senate to do what Tennesseans and Americans all across our country are doing: opening our arms and asking what we can do for help—for all displaced children, not just some children.

Katrina displaced 20 times more families than any natural disaster in the history of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Three hundred and seventy-two thousand (372,000) of those displaced persons are children who were just beginning the K-12 school year. Seventy-three thousand (73,000) were college students.

The president has proposed $2.6 billion in funding for students in elementary and secondary schools and colleges. Under his proposal:

• Colleges and universities would receive $1,000 for each displaced student enrolled;
• No person in Louisiana , Mississippi and Alabama would have to pay interest on their student loans for the next six months;
• Public school districts would receive up to 90 percent of the state’s per pupil expenditure, up to $7,500;
• And $488 million would go to help displaced students who attend private schools.

The president is not throwing out a lifeline to just some displaced students. He is trying to help them all. The private schools in Tennessee are not turning their backs.  They are opening their arms. Katrina didn’t discriminate and neither should we. The only politically charged approaches are coming from those who oppose helping every child.

This is not the beginning of some new voucher program. It is the beginning of a big, one-year effort to help children who are in desperate trouble. And the best way to do it in most cases is simply to let the money follow the child.

We have already approved vouchers that follow displaced persons for housing. And food stamps are vouchers. No one is suggesting that a displaced mother cannot take her federal child care voucher to a Catholic day care center. No one is suggesting that we can’t pay Boston College or Harvard University $1,000 for enrolling a displaced student who was set to attend Loyola or Xavier in New Orleans .

Scholars agree there is no constitutional issue here. I hope that my fellow members of Congress don’t just stand around and argue about old ideologies and leave these displaced children standing on the levee because the doors that are open to them for this one year happen to be those of a private school.

At the end of World War II, a grateful nation enacted the GI Bill giving veterans scholarships for college. A lot of veterans had these vouchers for college, but no high school degree. So thousands of veterans took their GI vouchers to Catholic high schools to earn their high school diploma. That did not create a big new voucher program for high schools, and this won’t either. This is a one year disaster relief program for kids from the Gulf Coast who need help.

The public schools are brimming over. They need help from private schools. I hope those who are objecting to helping all displaced school children will think again. We can have our debates about vouchers next year when the floodwaters subside and the schools are open again. Right now we need to be throwing out every lifeline that we can—for all of Katrina’s displaced school children, not just some.

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Higher Education Reauthorization – I’m pleased to report that the Higher Education Amendments of 2005 passed out of the Senate HELP committee. It’s a good bill for students and a good bill for improving the quality of our colleges and universities. For students, it increases the amount of Pell Grants from $4,050 to $4,500 over five years, and for the first time makes Pell Grants available year-round. For colleges and universities, this bill begins to relieve the oppressive paperwork burden the federal government places on them, freeing up scarce dollars to spend on improving quality, teaching and research, rather than paperwork. It creates an expert panel to review, evaluate and streamline the 7,000 federal regulations that govern grants and loans to college students. Also, for the first time, the federal government will be required to develop a compliance calendar, making it easier for our 6,000 colleges and universities to comply with federal rules, and helping them with institutional planning and in avoiding inadvertent errors in meeting these requirements. Finally, universities that do a good job keeping down the rate of loan defaults will be given more flexibility in how they use federal dollars for grants and loans to students.

Combating Methamphetamine Production – In 2004, Tennessee ranked second in the nation in the number of meth lab seizures, according to data from the Office of National Drug Control Policy. The Drug Enforcement Agency calculates that Tennessee accounts for 75 percent of the meth lab seizures in the Southeast. To help combat this problem, I supported passage of an amendment to the Commerce, Justice, Science Appropriations Act of 2006 designed to combat the manufacture and use of meth by limiting access to pseudoephedrine, the primary chemical used in its production. This legislation takes aim at the biggest problem faced by law enforcement in dealing with meth – choking off the supply of materials needed to manufacture the drug.

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I thought you might be interested in these articles that recently ran in the Memphis Commercial Appeal and the Kingsport Times News:

Memphis Sharp plant will benefit as producer of panels
http://alexander.senate.gov/index.cfm?FuseAction=Articles.Detail&Article_id=60&Month=8&Year=2005

Civic illiteracy is a threat to American’s democracy
http://alexander.senate.gov/index.cfm?FuseAction=Articles.Detail&Article_id=61


                                                                      

Senator Alexander receives a “GRAMMY on the Hill” from BMI Vice President Paul Corbin and recording artist Crystal Gayle for recognizing the value of the creative community as governor, education secretary and senator. GRAMMYs on the Hill annually honor three outstanding individuals who have improved the environment for music and its makers. Representative Steny Hoyer (D-MD) and Gloria Estefan also received the honor this year.