Last Saturday, we gathered for an education conference at Baltimore's Lake Clifton-Eastern High School to listen and learn as 300 parents and teachers gave us their best thinking about academic excellence, health and school safety.

During that meeting, I announced that Baltimore City will receive an additional $2.6 million in federal funding this year (with additional support to follow) as part of President Clinton's "Safe Schools / Healthy Students Initiative" to help our most troubled young people and reduce the threat of violence.

The dangers confronting young people are painfully real on the austere and dimly lit streets of many Baltimore neighborhoods, mine included. Inadequate educational funding remains a serious barrier to our children's future - despite essential "Title I" federal resources.

In the wake of mass murder at affluent Columbine High School, however, we know that our youngsters are not alone in their vulnerability. After Columbine, America seeks to understand why our children are dying.

Poverty and prejudice are not the only child killers in America. When parents, families and neighbors have other priorities, children born into material affluence also can suffer from intellectual and spiritual starvation. When minds are unchallenged, hearts neglected and souls ignored, everyone's child is threatened.

Poor and rich alike - black, brown, yellow or white - America's young people are engaged in a struggle. We must find the additional money needed to improve their schools, but we also must confront the loss of hope and the absence of meaning in too many young lives.

As Dr. Cornel West, noted Harvard theologian and author, has observed, "Without hope there can be no future; and without meaning there can be no struggle to achieve a better future."

There is an inspiring corollary to Dr. West's warning, however. "As long as hope remains and meaning is preserved," he has written, "the possibility of overcoming life's obstacles remains alive."

For most of us who have survived and become healthy adults, our parents were the primary source of our childhood hope, our most enduring youthful companions as we searched for meaning in our lives. That is why it was so important for parents and teachers to come together to work for our children's future last Saturday.

As Dr. James P. Comer, founder of Yale's School Development Program and our keynote speaker, insightfully recalled, "Growing up as a child, we were caught in a seamless web of support. All these adults were locked in a conspiracy to be sure we were going to become responsible young adults."

Building upon the last year's parental involvement initiative by the Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance, our conference was an important step toward reestablishing that supportive social web for our children, toward restoring Baltimore City's public schools as a national model of educational excellence.

In our city, as elsewhere, "taking back control of our schools" will require the commitment and active personal involvement of our entire community. Nothing less will be sufficient.

During her remarks to us, Ms. Bernadette Forman, President of the Baltimore City Council of PTAs, justifiably declared, "We have tried to give our children everything we did not have when we were young. What we must do is give them what we do have."

What each of us has to give is our time, our effort and - most important of all - our love.

My life has been blessed by my contacts with many wonderful children. I have looked into their shining eyes and seen the irrefutable proof that every child begins life in brilliance.

Our involvement in their education and growth is the kindling which fuels their God-given spark of life. If we will but tend the fires of intelligence which burn in their minds, the brilliance will grow ever brighter - fires which enlighten, rather than consume.