so it was as important -- probably more important than well in acquiring and becoming part of the black elite. to give you a sense of -- let me see, so that's my great grandfather, philip white. so think of him as the image of respectability, okay? so he has to start store, and makes quite a bit of money, promotes black education, he is the pillar of saint philip's episcopal church. he is mr. respectability himself. so i now want to go on to the disrespectful because the kids an idea about this respectability -- of respectability by looking at this respectability. so here he gives. you can turn to my family tree. this is my great, great

grandparent, joseph marshall and elizabeth t. let marshall. this is elizabeth's brother. he is my great great great grand uncle. and his name is james hewitt and the only way i could really give you a flavor of what he is like us to read the passage from a book, so i'm going to do a little reading now. the details of hewitt's career fascinating that incomplete. he was a member of the african growth theater formed by william brown in 1821. so this is a location on mercer street. they gave you broadway, lawrence street and now this is mercer street. so the african growth theater formed by william brown in 1821. initially the aspen grove was simply a tea garden in brown's backyard, where black new yorkers congregated for musical events and social activities. once the theater company was formed, he played in different

locations until brown opened his own space on mercer street in 1822. from then until the early 1830s, hewitt performed with rounds company and also in many other venues close to home, the military guardian in brooklyn, somewhat farther afield in philadelphia, saratoga in alexandria, virginia and even across the seas in london and south america. hulett aspire to be a pure shakespearian terror. he played the lead role in richard the third and also gave solo performance is a scenes from a fellow. much like other budding actors of the day, he honed his craft by imitating famous shakespearean performers like admin team. some of hewitt's other roles were more explicitly subversive however. , indirectly hinting at subordination resistance to black americans.

.. >> so it's not necessarily his acting or politics that his family, so offensive. they might have enjoyed watching him and the rules of richard iii or the king, but racism made him go in a dangerous activity. from the start, white new yorkers were hostile to brown enterprise. the complaint about malaise from

that t. garden. they object to the theater staging of shakespeare's most popular play of the day and presented a brown's aggressive recruitment of white customers. in 1822, commodores burst out into the open. the police raided the theater during a january performance and arrested the actors. a group followed suit in august storming of the theater and causing a riot. hewitt assumed to have the skill to bodily harm although brown was severely beaten. it's also true that hulett could single-handedly stroke of bad publicity that must have made his family cringe. first, there were reports possibly true, possibly not come about his performance is that was on the stereotype of the child like black. pamphleteer siren snipes insisted that when hewitt simbel let's he translated the lyrics into black dialect, reciting

lines [inaudible] is a heart that never left for the disabled. british actor charles matthews who had presented him while touring the united states also satirized and in public. returning to london, mathews created a show based on his american trip in which he mocked his strange and ludicrous alterations to hamlet which included his singing of the real negro melody at the end of the performance. hewlett responded by publishing a rebuttal when a local newspaper. defending his own acting abilities as well as the right of blacks to perform shakespeare. although a laudable act of self-defense, the letter also opened a hewlett up to more bad publicity. then there were hewlett's repeated problems with the law. in some cases, he was a victim or a mere bystander. when he decided to open a shop which was a dry cleaners in 1823

to make ends meet, a competitor beat him up. in 1825, hewlett took a position as stewart on board a ship but was obliged to testify in court after a passenger was accused of repeatedly assaulting the only other passenger on board. but in later years, hewlett turned perpetrator. in 1835, he signed up as the ships to word. while still on port he was arrested and convicted of stealing various articles from the ship including several bottles of wine and porter and served a six month sentence. in 1837, he was accused of seducing and abandoning a white woman and was sentenced to one months of hard labor. later the same year, he was caught stealing a watch from the house of a man who just died and was returned to prison. despite his please, gentlemen,

please don't put me in the newspapers. it will hurt my characters come his misdeeds were reported in the press. after this episode, hewlett disappears from public view. so i did my best to try to trace him down but with no luck. so that gives you an example of this respectability, the kind of things the black elite and my family sharm and wanted to have no part of. so i want to come back and say a little bit about women, and one can say i can talk more about what they did in the q&a, but here i just want to point out the way in which women as part of the black elite helped to police the norms of respectable behavior. so they were the ones who were very prominent in defining the norms of respectability. the memoir offers a rare and fascinating glimpse into the social lives of the black elite

and tells of the pleasures they enjoyed the sport the horace conditions under which they labored. among the friends of our family or to circle's founded on personal preference. these were led respectively by mrs. clarice, that is his wife, and elizabeth west bowers the former gathered about her the studious and the conservative and kept the open house for all visitors of note. the latter was surrounded by loving folks young and old. and this not to have a good time was impossible. dhaka honor of being able to hope the strain of french blood made her queen of entertainers and covered her with a taste in social functions that were irreproachable. many pages later she added a third woman, her mother. so if i can go back, married

joseph lyons. her mother to the list. mother was the life of a mine herger but young single and married folks who found in her asocial woman whose company was as agreeable as when she was a meeting. with her it was possible to have a good time without fathers. her guests were frequent and they played games were sold for charity. and all like found many an opportunity to pass many delightful hours with her in the home or courtesy, sociability and friendliness reamed supreme. it was permissible for the families to move one circle to another. no hard and fast lines were drawn however eclectic for the same could be now in one circle and the other so you can understand how somebody like tsongas james hewlett with his acting career and his brushes

and time spent in prison with his hard labor and so forth would not have been welcome at were courtesy, sociability and friendliness ranks supreme. the other thing i can point out about this passage i think it gives you a glimpse into something i try but really had a hard time talking about in my book, which was pleasure because we are so used to talking about subordinated people as oppressed and subordinated and being victims, having a downtrodden life, and always having a sense of obligation of duty and so forth. in the one of the things i try to capture a year and the social life and also their participation in the st. philip's episcopal church was the sense of pleasure and appreciation of beauty that certainly try think of the episcopal the nomination in

rituals, and the ability to enjoy the beauty, to enjoy aesthetic experience. so i'm going to close down. if you read my book we go from lower manhattan over to brooklyn in 1870, and the book goes up to about 1895. so we have a kind of scattering of the black population and of course later they go up to harlem about after 1910 or whatever. so the conclusion, rather than talk about scattering, i want to talk about coming together. on an october day last fall i took a trip to cypress hills cemetery in brooklyn armed with a map provided by the front office i went searching for the graves of my forebears and their friends who left lower manhattan and leader brooklyn for their final resting place. the white family plot lay on the flat land near a broad path surrounded by tall of leafy

trees. there were phillips mother elizabeth, to of the sisters and their family and philip and his family. alexander crummell, charles ray and their families lay nearby. so why did have a chance to talk about them in the talks but that figure prominently in the book. right next to phillips great lead kings met recently rediscovered and commemorated with a brand new marker. i was astonished to discover that all these men had bought their plots at the same time between january and may of 1850 and determined not even death would submit them to be causing the past walking up the hill life around the land that st. philip's church had bought for the parishioners in the late 1850's. the family plot which included peter was notable for that jutted skyward. in the waning days of the 19th century, new york's black elite reunited in the ground to read

the graves are physical reminders of their lives and commemorations of their def. the serve as an archive, a place of safekeeping, storing memory is of the past simply waiting to be brought back to life in the rightness of time thank you. [applause] >> thank you for your presentation. what did it feel like when you had this moment of finding a puzzle piece and also discovering that you were missing other pieces? in putting together these

threads did you ask any of the sources how they can to have this information? >> the first thing i will point out and it's not exactly what you asked me but i want to make this clear i had nobody living to ask. i had a couple of leaves, a woman who contacted me after seeing something that i wrote on the web, and i was so excited that day i teach at the university maryland and remember running into work saying later this afternoon i'm going to call this woman and she's going to fill in the gatt. she wanted information from me. so i'm just so disappointed. then the second question is finding the manuscript material. i would shake and quiver so finding that when least expected

there were 12 shoeboxes about like that, remember in the old days, and i got into the box eight and there's a moment that weariness sits a man and you're like how can i do this and i go out in the cold and shake and of course you're in a manuscript room and you have looked at everything outside and you are wearing gloves and the book is open, you are facing the archivist to be sure that you don't run away with anything and you have something called a snake to put down to hold things down and then if that you're magnifying glass say you have all this paraphernalia and around you and it's so hard to get -- you feel the emotion but it's hard to express them. when i found the one of the new york historical society, and those days and days of just going through these written records, and i was like why am i doing this and the young men

there i went and told him he got really excited this is the one excitement, i should give you this book. i like yeah, you know why can't. so that's number two. this third question was about -- >> [inaudible] >> yes. okay, so at the schaumburg a woman had written a book called quote code the free negro in antebellum new york," it was a columbia dissertation from the 1970's and she died before publishing it. her name was rhoda goldman, and her husband had gotten it published as a book and then gave the manuscript collection to the schaumburg, and the book is old and everybody says go to the recent scholarship. but she had really done her

homework. she did everything. and i ended up just repeating what she did just for verifying that everything she had panned out. so the material i saw in her book by kind is expected to find there as a primary source not just as a footnote but i was really stunned to find that and nobody knows where the scrapbook page comes from and that is another one of the -- the gaps that i can't fill in where does it come from? somebody cared enough. so, there are poems next to the obituary and each cullom i realized is about something significant in my great-grandfather's life. so there's trinity, the mother church of st. philip about dalia and going to heaven and god

saying why do you deserve to be here and he says asked my wife and daughters. the person really knew philip and loved him and that's the whole commemoration right there. but i don't know. >> my name is andrea kafeel with of the lower east side project. thank you for the presentation. it gives me goose bumps one of your relatives is actually james hewlett. [laughter] that's amazing. i just took a tour a few weeks ago so this is amazing. my question is where was the lawrence street school located?

>> it was on mclaurin street which was one block parallel to thompson >> oats la guardia now, thank you. >> agreed to read and - off on bond street, do you have an address like that? >> it's in my book. i think it's 50 something. yes. >> that would have been approximately what year? >> that would have been the 50's he moves to cleveland after the end i'm not sure he ever comes back. he's in cleveland in 1860. comes back to visit but not to live so i would say the shop was in the 1850's. i'm pretty sure that it's in the 1850's.

>> i don't remember if you mentioned how long it took you from the data you decided to do this until the actual book came out, but i sure that he went through such an of and the down escalator of emotion. how do you know when you were all done and feel like you're finished with? >> that's a good question because nobody else knew and i am not sure i did. i just i was tenacious and i would dig and dig and couldn't give it a rest and after about two or three years my husband said why don't you start writing? i never had anything to write. well you've been looking at this for two or three years. well, i have a health plan, the

bear bones of it, but i know it's the detail the will make the books is all. it's all going to be in the detail. so getting the date and it is 56 bond street. getting that right is going to make a difference in the world so i would say why start writing if i have to go over it so i really wanted the detail and i dug and dug long before people told me to stop especially historians and i may literary critic by training and teaching in an english department and am not a historian but people were laughing saying give it a rest. so i will give you one example. an independent scholar had some of the obituary with james

mccann smith and this somewhat cranky independent scholar said how do you know? it's in the obituary. well, you don't know. so i decided i should try he and track it down and i started looking for the apprenticeships and then his going to the coverage of the pharmacy of new york which is also in the obituary and i found at the college to become part of columbia in 1903 or 04 and was part of the college of pharmacy in the starkest of columbia and started pestering him and said we don't have good copies which was like i don't believe you. so i decided i'm going to start looking so i started calling historians of the pharmacy and around the country and i called

here and there and elsewhere and i finally said this is my last phone call and i reached a man some place i think it was ohio state and he said to me the best cash for four missing papers are the wisconsin historical society. i was like i didn't know that and he said yes because this in the university of wisconsin was the first school to his publishing graduate department in a pharmacy beckham 19th century and that is when my history and friends were really laughing but i found it. i went through and i found the record of his entrance of his graduation and syria's leaders of his admission as a member of

the college like having a professional membership and the young men who graduated with him there were four of them. they had gotten in. they graduated in april of 1844 and became members of 1844 and it took my great-grandfather until 1870's to become a member and the was worth it. after that i said that's enough. [laughter] that's enough. >> you have wonderful information about the 1840's and your family in the 1850's about them in the 70's and 80's, so i'm really wondering about the 1860's and the civil war and what happened with your family if you have any scraps. >> i do and was my talk from last week. at the time of the draft and we to dhaka that the draft riots at

the time they were the week of july 13th 1863 and it's possible that once again the black elite thought that class would be free and they weren't, they were destroyed as if they were just because they were black so the big story is of colored or from the asylum and the way in which it was by white women seeing that as an illegitimate act on the part of white but of lunch with into words on deserving black children and that was destroying. the home of norman powell was destroyed. the home of elbe reliance was destroyed so it has amazing account on who the ander water

street and on the third assault was successful and burned to the ground. so, in williamson's papers i came across a notes and it's down there. i won't read, where a sergeant rights to albert winans and says i'm going to try to help you. i don't know what today will bring. meet me at the said the drug store at 3 p.m. and i will conduct you to safety. so the lions and the low white lived on the ander water street just doors from one another and philips might pharmacy was around the corner of frankfort and i speculate that that's the pharmacy so it's just amazing to think the sergeant thought that was a safe enough place to take the family so i started reading

through the papers and obituaries and i sound of a story of the preservation of the pharmacy so he brought the pharmacy or in 1847 at the corner of frankfurt and gold stayed there until his death and established deep roots in the neighborhood. the neighborhood when he went in in 1847 was mixed. time went on became more and more irish, a poor irish, and according to all of the accounts that i read, he was a good neighbor so he made up much of the medications for them. when they didn't have money he gave the medications away for free. he gave away money in the close. so when the draft riots happened today didn't want to see the drugstore demolished. they didn't want to cecil white harmed. "the new york times" reprints

this little dialogue who knows how accurate it is when the businessmen of the neighborhood would also -- the area was called the swamp, and the businessmen of the swamp saw what was happening and said you need to run away. he said no, i don't. because as many rioters at have come down upon me as many neighbors i have will protect me and the drug store and was not disturbed. so, yeah. it was a real goose bumps moment yes. >> hi, im shannon triet i was wondering what made you write about your history of your family tree? i've been trying to research my own and i find it to be very hard, difficult to find things that go past the 1800's.

go way past that 1800's so i was wondering if you could give me any advice on how you found yours exactly. >> you have to have the passion. without the passion -- this took me 11 years so you have to put aside a bunch of time. the passion, the drive, the determination, the willingness to look and look and find nothing and then all of a sudden find something. one of the reasons i took tactics i did -- because there's such a way i could give written of the black new yorkers in the century -- but it's for that reason, to encourage people to look for their family history. people say you are so lucky you had a family to write about, he found material. i can't do that and i say have you tried? and they say no. of one of the things i want to do is encourage people to try. maybe i was indeed lucky because

i found the enough material about them. but how i wish my forefather had been james smith or georgetown and i would have found a lot more material on them. so you take what you have, that scrapped and try to embroider without going into fiction or making up why is that to really give it context. so that's the way that you have to do it. but don't give up. [laughter] >> ibm usually. we've discovered and on the ground railroad site in our neighborhood on 29th street, the gibbons underground railroad side, and so instead of feeling

satisfied that made my co-chair and i even more obsessed with research. so i recognize the phrase looking for a needle in a haystack. am i coming to a question? [laughter] >> what source is a deterrent to? have you started research? >> i was lucky that i got -- well, my cochaired a lot of research on the quaker abolitionist who lived in the building which was destroyed during the draft riots but then i kicked researching for more letters of the gibbons family, and i was sent with a hot tip by judith wollman, a historian. she said with columbia university. so i found a record of fugitives, 1855 by sidney howard

so that set me off on a search because i found the most extraordinary thing. sarah more was married to her husband and the division's previous home so now i'm trying to find sarah. i did find her listed in new haven connecticut but it's been -- that's taken me two years to find out. i'm going to go back to schaumburg but i shouldn't say on the record, there is one staff member who terrified me. he was so mean and i'm going to get my courage and go back. >> i've had experience with that, too. i will talk to you later. [laughter] i will talk to you later and give you the name -- >> thank you. >> -- of somebody wonderful who

will help you and i just saw her a couple nights ago. >> and i just bought your book. [laughter] >> thank you. let me tell you. there was a vigilant society, the african-american vigilant society. so you could look our ground for that. david would be born in nickname to research and a new book out i think it is a year old on david. >> i have that. i do have a question of. have you ever heard of louis napoleon? i'm trying to find him, too because he helped rescue this woman and was working with sidney howard then the editor and the secretary devotee do everything of the antislavery society. so now i know enough to know him and i know nothing. >> thank you.

>> charles ray's daughter put out a memoir of his life after he died i think that it's 1886 and that is about to schaumburg so you could look at that because he was a member of the judge ... ayittey triet i don't do very much with a vigilance society because i couldn't find any relationship between that and my family and i couldn't start talking about everything. my editors were going nuts for the blanket of the book but i would say david, charles ray and charles ray's memoir what about pursuing henry boyda beecher? >> i just started to scratch the surface with that. louis napoleon worked with him, too and in the brooklyn historical society and i realize as very helpful as they were i

was searching in the long collection. at the brooklyn historical society. so, a woman -- excuse me, i have to stop to the weekend talk leader and i will give you names. >> thank yoashington, d.c.,

this is just under an hour. >> thank you, mike. is this on? can you hear me okay? good. well, thank you very much. this is very unlikely even to actually have to say, not that i don't do readings as i call them of the politics and prose, in the unlikely part of this because i never really intended to do anything like this which i am 52-years-old. i managed to at least get through half a century and never

considered i would do something like this but, a little less than a year ago, february 6 last year i was talking to my mother on the occasion will father's 99th birthday when of course the 100th birthday came up. can you believe that he is going to be 100, she says to me? she calls him devotee of course to her kids still to read and i am saying to her yes, isn't that something? that's just incredible. in sight i am thinking please, not another aircraft carrier. please don't make me go to the dedication of a bridge or something like that. but then i got to thinking about that 100 years. 100 years as a long time. that 100 years is a particularly long time, a momentous time. it was a different world he came from when which may explain some

of his best his family noticed often nothing grim or strange or creepy really, he's always believed to almost too good. he doesn't gossip about anybody, not once like most men he never blustered, either to read most can be counted on occasionally to come home and i'm going to kick that son of a gun -- not my father. never to read never raised his voice really. he did once almost non-dak mike dever olver with a set of keys firing at his chest. i don't know what he was upset about but he never yelled or anything like that to be it he was a soft-spoken guy and if you wanted to make you feel bad because you'd done something wrong, his tone would acquire a kind of graphic paucity after we

started speaking slower and slower until finally in the book a sound like just gerbils squeaking after a while. but i was conscious of the fact when i started that my father has this sort of scarcely reachable court to him the percentage all of us all in the president of the united states, governor of california and all that, when you see is what you get. the same guy at the dinner table was delivering the state of the union address. that 90% was absolutely consistent and trustworthy. count on it. all day long. but there was this 10% metaphorically speaking that he held very close. and everybody in his family -- those of us who knew him very well were aware of this 10%, were aware there was a part of him, even my mother, that you couldn't always reach.

a very, very private part of him and that is the part to my determined to go looking for because the was the part most inaccessible and the was the mysterious part, the was the anik am i, not the 90%. that was just right out there. the 10%, where did that come from? where was that all about? so i went to try to find that married to the 100 years is telling me something. that 10% had to be forming itself in his early years swaybacked at dix in and all these other towns he lifted and so that's where i went searching curia i have to say if you are going to write a story about your own father it certainly helps if you have a pulitzer prize-winning biographer taking notes. a lot of your research is

already done. so i rely on many of the books that have already been written for a fact st dates and seduce and things like that but of course those people have accomplished edward morris being that pulitzer prize-winning biographer for 14 years, but they didn't grow up with him. they were looking at him from the outside, looking at him from the inside. many people know more about the policy and politics than i do. i didn't make the study or cover him while he was in the white house. but i grew up with them. i knew him since i was this big. people remember him as president and for the challenger disaster may be worth some state of the union address or the assassination attempt some things like that. i remember going away back when he would pick me up over his head and fly me to bed at night making a propeller sound that he would do down under the doorways

and into the bed and finally he would sing me a little song and sleep me to sleep. that's my memory of him. but still, he was a mysterious, so off i go looking. i didn't stop at just the child. i was interested in the family history as well so i went all the way back to ireland to who came out of the mountains or nobody's quite sure, they listed both when they talk about him, and he married a girl named to margaret murphy and they lived outside of the valley which may be a town that gave her devotee followed my father. but this is where they really lived. there is no do list anymore because a was just a collection of like mud and sticks to you and me. they make their homes out of mud and sticks and the immelt back into the turf after a while to

read these were poor irish people, peasants really. the owned nothing. they were landless laborers. the woodwork other people's fields. in the great calamity of the 19th century the irish, the population today has not recovered fully from the potato famine of the late 1840's. there still aren't as many in today as there were in 1845 let's say. so right in the middle of this, george poor, literally dirt poor the family at that point, michael was the only child in the family. my great, great grandfather, she learned to read somehow. he became a soap maker and then moved the family to england and here is one of the only pieces

of research i can claim and be proud of. i got a little thin mail from ancestry.com. i don't know if you know that it is the geological web site and i founded four years ago. now available the 1851 british -- 1851? the move to 1849 and lived in south london. maybe they are in the census. maybe michael and his bride are in the census. but they are irish peasants living in a slum. no one counts those people. well, they were very efficient as it turns out and in fact they did count those kind of people there is michael now so she's now michael reagan living with a bunch of other poor irish youth from southwest of ireland and don bentley street in south

london i know he's going to mary katherine while he's there i wonder is she in the census? i go looking for her and sure enough there is kathryn living had a corner across the street from michael reagan so they must have that right there. she's a gardiner living with poor irish people from the southwest of ireland including a young woman who is identified as a hitter ticker. you don't see too many have their pictures these days. so this is the sort of a family that he came from. michael comes over to america and he has some children of one of which is john michael for the first time reagan who gets jack reagan, have recalls and jack and that's my father-son. what did i find when i start of looking at my father getting past of a family history and stuff? we think of him i fink -- i do

-- as a big strapping confident kind of guy not afraid of anything. what could scare him? but when he was a little way it turns out he was under size as a use. his family moved around a lot come he was the new kid in school, she was picked on by police and was chosen last four games on the playground and spent a lot of this time alone. he spent a lot of his time in places like the attic of a rental housing in galesburg or the previous owner left strange artifacts, as he said, up in the attic so he would spend his time up in floods sunbeams in the attic going live through all these things and strange plants many of which seemed to come from the west and i think there he began to form this impression of the west as a wide-open

landscape. but instead of roaming the landscape as an undersized city he saw himself growing into a hero in that landscape. he could do heroic things and his mother encouraged him in this. she called him perfectly wonderful and she never changed her opinion of him. it was always her perfectly wonderful ronald. to the father what he saw is he makes a helluva lot of malaise for dutch man, doesn't he? that's how he became dutch treat everybody but his mother. everybody else called him the edge when he was young so this is a little kid dreaming these dreams of this life ahead where he will be a hero and he will run this landscape being the guy in the white hat who saves the day. the compassion yet removed hero

because he's alone, salam terrie. by the time he's 15 he's found perhaps the perfect job for him and he calls it the best job he ever had. it was a lifeguard in the park north of dixon illinois with a father moved by that time. for devotee and lifeguard clauses of the local ymca and distinguished himself as a phenomenally talented swimmer and studied artificial respiration so he knew he would be a lifeguard and he went on to the park to talk to the park and the concession stand and the data driven down and the he completed his sophomore year in high school and lots of people come, hundreds of people in the summer would be there and look at him and say i don't know. he may have taken classes at the

y. but he's going to have to die even there and saved people and he said give aa a chance. he can do it and he did. 70 years, 77 people pulled out of the river. as i did the math correctly that would come to 11 which would work out to about one person say one life saved for ten days or so on that river. imagine being a 15-year-old or 79 or 20-years-old for that matter what do you for your summer job? every ten days or so i will save somebody's life. some people say sure he goes into the river and pulls a person out. that can't be too oppressive. i visited for the first time and it flows to the mississippi it's a major river, a powerful river. you get caught up in that current and you don't know how

to swim and you are in trouble headed downstream in a hurry somebody has to come and get you out of that trouble. well this who that was for seven years. he learned as i think it was a perfect job for him because he was the focus of attention, the man of the hour when things went wrong she was the one of a deterrent to get at the same time she could remain solidary. you have to be removed as the lifeguard and you can't be off choosing the concession stand or hanging out with your buddies telling them you've got to be paying attention and giving them these nearsighted he's got to be paying attention staring through his thick glasses the whole time trying to figure out who is going to get in trouble and where. he was thinking the planet's

aligned, keeping the universe in order by pulling those people out of the river, drowning people for chaos and my father couldn't stand chaos. he liked his moral orderly so that he would be free to dream and peaceful tranquillity so he would dive into the rivers and pull people out. almost nobody ever think to him for doing this. he learned a lot about human nature, too i think. no man would think him for being rescued and he did dillinger limitation of him because after he would do the rescue as his father actually told him because he complained no one ever thinks me and he said to get a wally or stomp and carve a notch for every person you rescue so he would come 77 notches on a driftwood log eventually but he would imitate people coming up to him and then he rescued he pulled out of the river and

really in trouble out there at all and he carved them off john alana. >> one man did think him and the only whoever did this as a giant of a man that arrived at the river one day with somebody reading to him because he was totally blind. 6 feet five and my father fought hell am i going to get him out of the river if he gets in trouble out there? he told me when i was little there were some techniques they did not teach you at the ymca for rescuing people, some of which involved hitting them with a right cross to the jewels of you could get them back to shore

because tirana anybody will tell the rescuer, you are frantic out there. a 15-year-old boy you have to rescue the men who will be ater with his hands and into the water goes like father thinking all the time this may be the last time i do this. he's going to take me to the bottom and we are going to be rolling along all the way to sterling down the stream. but he says as soon as he reached the man and put his hand on him, the man instantly

relaxed and let him do whatever he wanted because he had been led around all his life and as soon as he felt a human touch he felt unsafe and relaxed and the was the only man that ever. he did get some notoriety for doing this, the first time he got his name in the paper was a rescue. she closed the park at about nine thanks 30 and he is to do this in the lights people linger forever and he had been there since ten in the morning. i want to go home. but people wanted me to stay because it was hot so he started taking little pebbles and flicking them into the water and sure enough people would say what was that? what was that? just the old river rafts that usually emptied the beach. so they had done their job and he was at the concession stand

helping ed close of and all of a sudden, three people come to young women and young man comes screaming out of the darkness from the direction of the river. help, help. their friend had this look down to the river unbeknownst to anybody and wasn't the strongest they fought went under so now it's my time coaster become 10:00 at night and dark and there is a man in the river whose drowning. so off - author goes in a full gallop towards the river listening now because he can't see the man. remember he's near site and has to get rid of his glasses to go in the water so he is listening for the sound of the man struggling. where do i need to go to find him? he plunges into the darkness, swings out, the next day's headline james snatched from the jaws of death, a lifeguard

ronald reagan helped in quite a struggle they reported he was able to subdue him and bring him to shore with one arm against the current with him, dragged him up onto the lawn, perform artificial respiration to revive him after which it was determined he was okay and sent home, but he had his name in the paper. i think he was probably happy about that. other than that, and maybe the lateness of the hour the rescue probably would have seemed rather routine to him, just another day on the river. my father was a storyteller. his great opus was himself. he created a narrative, a template for his life to read it wasn't that he was making that a story about himself that he would pretend to live. he was creating a template in his mind and trying to live up to it he wanted to be a hero but

not just be seen as a hero and he really wanted to be a hero. when you are a storyteller sometimes editing is required and i discovered in some of my father's early stories i read as a child that there was some editing done to focus the narrative usually focusing on him and the iconic story from his youth is one winter night, 1922, he comes home from the y or maybe it was a library or anywhere car he spent a lot of time reading there and he's coming at the avenue towards his home in dixon and he notices as he approaches the front door that there is a dark shape by the doorstep which when he arrives closer he discovers it's his own father passed out dead drunk belching up corn whiskey. he has been aware that his father how would give in to some

drinking. i think that's exaggerated that he didn't drink. the parents would have roused about this. his mother was quite high as and didn't approve of that drinking and things like that. he heard the fights before but just through the covers over his head and tried to ignore. in this iconic moment she's having his coming of age experience so he says while he was tempted to step of a father and coincided fix himself something to eat and go to bed he couldn't leave him out in the snow so he grabs his father's collar and drags them over the threshold and somehow muscles them up this steep narrow in gold stairway to his bedroom and puts them into bed and goes down and briefs not a word to his mother when she gets home as she would of course the threshold, the staircase, and i thought

about dutch who probably couldn't way 100 pounds at that point but a rather burleigh jack who weighed about 180 or so and i thought to myself she certainly didn't strike him up those stairs. i have no doubt he passed him drunk on the doorstep and no doubt that he grabbed his coach and probably gave him and shake but what happened suspect is that jack quote gup and staggered to his feet and probably had a few things to say at that point, profession and probably as well but the would-be destruction. the young man having his coming of age moment, giving jack too many lines would not work. he has to hit the cutting room floor and he would do things like this.

he had a tendency, skidding through a lot of stuff, to engage in a certain denial. he was taunted at denial when he needed to be sometimes too rather humorous effects. my wife and i once in washington while he was president or accompanying him to and the tent, i can't remember what it was what we were in the presidential motorcade coming back from whatever this was and there were people lining the streets and his waving and all that. at this point in his life he decided with american aid was a thumbs-up gesture so he had been traveling around the country from so that people. no jester sood a man so well i have to say. as we were driving back he was giving a thumbs-up to the people outside of the car. we reached a certain point and some man in his 30s or so got under this of course of the police tape or work through the line, i don't know how he got so

close to the car but there he was maybe a body link for two from the limousine on my father's side of the car promoting a different hand gesture. [laughter] he had a different room digit hoisted in my father's direction. you couldn't hear through the bulletproof glass but a word beginning with mother and ending in another word was being deployed at the same time. without the same beat he turns to us and says see, i think it's catching on. [laughter] that was my dad. i suppose i should say because you probably heard about some of this, i should say a word about the present controversy, which is apparently erupted with the publication of this book. my brother took it upon himself to help sell copies of the book so i owe him a thank you note i

guess and he did it without even reading the book. that's how good a brother he is. the centers of course another alzheimer's. my father died of alzheimer's of course. he was diagnosed several years after he left office. i say two things in the book that really to this in any way. one, i admit midway through the term as president from '83, '84, that i would occasionally notice things that seem just a hitch from the getty of this house i would characterize in any specific way and not anything for anybody that didn't gerlach in the house with him would know this. it's a change in there for a film or their body language, the way they tell the story, anything is going to tip you off and maybe they are a little

under the weather or having a bad day or something. so i mentioned that i did have concerns. i don't put a name to them or diagnose them with alzheimer's at the time i simply mention these concerns and i have to say that he was in the mid-70's by that time, the oldest president elected. he was losing his hearing and a heated wearing hearing aids, so that makes you -- and he had been shot and nearly killed which will take a little out of your sales. so i have all sorts of things to worry about and this was just sort of background to worry. i do say later in the one chapter we deal with any of this there is one sentence that specifically links the presidency of alzheimer's and it is a deduction based on when he was diagnosed and what we now know about alzheimer's disease which is it is a process that extends for years even decades

before identifiable observable symptoms are present. if i'm going to get alzheimer's in my seventies, you can look at my brain right now and tell their would be changes going on right now. .. i've been answering questions for the last week and a half of people saying yes, but you say and i say no i didn't. show me where i say.

they can't because they didn't read the book and they're making stuff up. so i pretty much explain to you exactly what my side of that controversy is. i don't know if he had alzheimer's for sure when he was in office. i think it's a likelihood the disease was present. i did not see signs of dementia, nor do i see that i did and that is about it as far as that goes. at heart this is not a political book by the way. i've no interest in doing a political history of them. it is a boat primarily about his early life, his formative years. it is an attempt to buy sun to find his father, to go looking in these distant -- the distant past as it were for his father's rather elusive character. in the last chapter he bring you up to date -- somewhat up to date into the white house and to the end of his life. i just determined that was the way to embed both, to jump ahead

and so that's what he did and you can't do that without mentioning alzheimer's of course. since i mentioned that i knew it had to do with it forthrightly and his honesty and cleanly as i could. that's what i have to say about it. i will take any questions you may pass. it would be happy to entertain questions. so use the microphone if you want or just shout out from where you are a guest. [applause] >> one of the things you mention its incredible weight, which i had occasion to witness and has been so photogenic. there is indication the white house for it to go through stacks of photographs with vips to identify them and there wasn't a single shot in which he was not kidnapped. >> and looking good. i bet his drivers license photo

is a keeper. really, but i could not take a bad picture. >> that's not my question. it has to do with religion. i haven't read your whole book. i've read a few of the first chapters, but she mentioned his catholic/protestant mother or father, that sort of thing. >> jack was an on-again off-again catholic and nelly was a disciple of christ as they call it. >> my curiosity is around that, as his son to emulate what his parents did with them in terms of letting them decide later on in life vis-à-vis healing the children? hatted religion -- a wasn't a carter with his religion on his sleeve, but he wasn't a george washington had never talked about it in public. so i'd be curious to get your overview on that whole issue. >> the whole issue as it was a private kind of thing. he wasn't ashamed of it. he was quite open and needed to

win an election. but he did not -- he did not go around the house like some holy roller or anything. we weren't having bible readings or anything like that in the house. he was a regular church goer when he was governor of california and before that when he got to d.c. here, he felt a little awkward going to church because he know a district things and could potentially be a threat to other people. i mean, we see that happen sometimes to politicians. he did follow after his parents and nelly in particular is a disciple of christ. their doctrine is you do not try and indoctrinate young people, children into your religion because they're not old enough to appreciate this. they can make decisions for themselves and you need to let them do that. he took that attitude with me, although i don't and he was entirely happy about it. i announced when i was 12 years old as i relate in the book that i was not going to church

anymore. i had the same ringtone by the way. he came in to get me to go to church. come on, put your suit on. i said i'm not going. i don't believe this anymore. and he was pretty upset about it, but it hurt more. i could see he was very worried, but he wasn't going to wrestle me into church. i wasn't going to work. put me in a half nelson and take me to the altar for some sort of exorcism. but i knew it wasn't going to give. he wasn't just going to rollover. so when they came home to find the pastor of our church in a living room waiting there to have a talk with me. nonmodal was his name who later became the pastor of our church when he found out he was tending to his thoughts on occasion with the same around his ankles. but he was a bit kind of a popular guy who used to play football for ucla, and he was

this big imposing guy and he was going to convince me to come back to church. but within a few minutes i realized i can have this argument with him. i was worried at first because he is a professional. i can hold my own here. after a few more minutes he gave up and landed up talking about football. my father was disappointed when he left i was still an atheist. >> that he didn't feel the need to commute with god before making decisions? >> search and not in any exhibition in the way. i think you would pray quietly at times for guidance. i know after he was shot he believed that his god had spared him, but he didn't see that is the kind of mandate like you're so special. you know, this is a responsibility he sought to do

good from there on out, which i really, as much as i disagreed about things, he really meant well and always thought he was doing the best he could for the country. >> if your mother has read your book, howd they're going to ask me. people have been ascribing sentiments to you and i don't want to do that myself. tell me what to say. she said you tell them i read it, i'd love to it made me cry and i'm very proud of you. such a mom thing to say. [applause] >> i particularly loved hearing you, the voice of reason on air america in the last two years. >> you haven't been around our

dinner table. >> i'm sure that's true. so is anything during? any chance he can hear you can nationally on radio? >> it is possible although there has been talk already with my publisher about maybe doing another book, which i would very much like to do. i rather liked that process in the home rhythm of that is opposed to the daily grind of a three-hour show. and temperamentally i would say i'm not as well-suited to radio radio as they would be to something like this it seems to me. i am not a yeller and there's a lot of that going around. to these book to resume duties radio satellite tour is for use in may keep throwing the hosts at you from this time in that town. we got to tampa, florida. but ted and jack show in florida. you might want to avoid the tag and jack show for at least ted.

within one minute is getting me on the air, ted had called me and ass, threatened to kick my ass and needed something extra to wipe his ass point. i thought, can i speak to jack? is very grown up in the pair they are? christos went on. this is all he said to me the whole time. i said, you're a small pathetic man, ted. and it turned out he was -- well i won't say -- she is just what you expect i discovered later. >> i used to work for bill foster, democrat from illinois sports stream. we tampa go and dixon our district or you could imagine for a democrat.

but we had a picture of your dad. not that he didn't like your dad, but if we do pay homage to your dad come as that was the proper forum to do it. so my question to you is out of the bag job is when the minor republican party votes are done and they constantly do, frankly for emulate his success and personality more than anything else. when poker.for policy positions are things that you think you know him and he just think he wouldn't say that or he wouldn't do that, does that make you mad? douceur to dismiss? how do you react to that quite >> it can be annoying at times i'll admit to that. but it comes with the territory. i understand why they're doing it. who else do they have? they're not going to go to nick some. harding?

hoover? they're pretty much stuck with ronald reagan, which is not so bad. i do note that many of those people not only did know them, but probably never met him and yet they are speaking for him. i am very reluctant to speak for my father and any specific legal sense. i don't know what he would feel about today's issues. he left the scene a long time ago and presumably his thinking would've been evolved along with the times. the white on getting too well, you'd want taxes to be lower ord want to repeal the health care plan or anything like that. i don't know what he would feel. i do so confident in saying he would be distressed by the level of the 12 that we hear these days. he was a simple man and a gentleman and i think a lot of this is, particularly directed at the white house, the birthday nonsense and all that stuff, he would just find that unique dignity of our country and would be distressed. there are a couple of things he

could be distressed by the reference for the s.t.a.r.t. treaty because that was such a big thing for him and jon kyl and some of those things were trying to hold it up. i mean, he would find that awful. the only other issue, which i was tempted to put in the book, but my editor commits new cannot have any politics at all because that will be the entire focus of any discussion he had with anybody and that would be the torture issue. my father signed a covenant called the deployment and he meant that. and that kind of cowardice and moral purpose to it wasn't just part of his or her. he would be nauseated by that. but that's my personal opinion. >> could you explain his political evolution? apparently he was a roosevelt democrat. >> the 14th district is so republican out there come his family were real outliers. check in on a roosevelt democrat

and republican county and they were weird and all sorts of ways. not where the disturbing weird, but just different. they were very theatrical people in a rather stoic tightlipped farm country. they love to put on plays and stuff and they were quite flamboyant about the whole thing. they were bohemians in a way. dixon was reluctant to admit this, but dixon was the tower but equal were not allowed to spend the night, not welcome to spend the night. in a hotel during an 1820s and 1930s. but that wasn't the case in the reagan home. i related in the book they arrive and dixon on their way back from playing some games somewhere and pull into a hotel in there too that players on the team and they say we've got room for your team, except the two

but players. in the coach, matt mckenzie with his name, a tough, flinty little scotsman said will go to another hotel. no hotel in town assistant manager is going to take those two black players. find this match, will sleep on the best. wilmot, my father at this point intervenes and says, you know, play with. so everyone doesn't fit on the bus, when he put me in a cab with my two friends and will go to my folks house. what are folks going to think of you showing up at two but players? and indeed, jack didn't care. jack didn't let the family see birth of a nation, d. w. griffith's film. damned if i let anyone in my family see that because it's about the clan against the blacks he says. and i'm not going to forget it. we're not going to die. so they were different. >> was it is time that ge?

>> yeah, not so much het. he became a conservative probably by the early 50s, late 40s or early 50s. [inaudible] >> yeah, he did. he voted for truman but then he voted for ike later. i think it was really the meetings that he had with some writers when he was president of the screen actors guild in one meetings are one of the writers informed him that given the choice between the american constitution that he would choose the soviet period and was so shocked, my father, that he thought we've got a real menace here. i've got to enlist in the fight against this. -- just sort of a brief overview. i don't get into that because i'm going back further and

earlier, but that is my understanding. yes, ma'am. >> thank you so much. you have inherited her father's gift of humor and speechify if that's a word. and you may not know the answer to this, after the recent tragedies in tucson, i have heard conversations about had there been a movement of some kind after the attempt on your father's life to do something to change that god? perishes conversation that had your dad perhaps been a bit more involved and found them -- to do something to correct the gun laws or the administration. and i just wondered if there had ever been any talk in your own family of just the necessity or importance of that.

>> not too much. i grew up with guns. when i was six years old my father presented me with it 22 caliber rifle which a cab to my room with bullets. i knew at age six. he explained to me this is not a toy. he never play with the spirit and friends come over, don't play with this like it's a toy. you leave it up there. you're a toy guns, play with them. and never ever point a real gun at anybody if it's loaded. forget if it's loaded or not. whatever. you never point a gun at somebody. as soon as loaded. the guns ritual for him. he didn't fetishize guns the way so many people do now. all they can think of when they think about the constitution of the united states is i get to carry my gun. it guarantees you the right to carry my gun. my gun, my god, my time. if you had a penis, you wouldn't

need the gun so badly. come on, get a grip on your whatever. [laughter] i don't know exactly what kind of have been. obviously he was sympathetic to the second amendment. but he didn't seem to fetishize the way so many people do now. i hope that answers someone at least. >> her father grew up in a time when the worst was an issue. he's the first divorced president. can you talk about his marriages and how the divorce affected things. >> 12 chainwide wyman and went to another which lasted 53 years until he died. i think the period of time in the late 40s, but the period of time when he was divorced from jane wyman and his film career post-world war ii was beginning to go down.

this was a rough, rough time for him. divorce and playing in a charity softball game shatters his femur and he is laid up on crutches and a cast in hanging at his mother's house for a long period of time. he recovers in time to go off into the hasty heart with patricia neal and richard todd who steals the movie. so meanwhile, jane wyman is about to collect an academy award. so he's just going to beat up like nothing's going right around 1949 or so. so that was that. i don't think he ever would've filed for divorce himself. however desperately he may have been in that marriage. i don't know how unhappy i was, but he never would've asked for divorce. she did and i think she's moving on on with her career and saw

him maybe as a liability. i don't want to be hanging out with somebody who was lower in the totem pole than me in that kind of thing. even if i have to be married and have children, i don't want to do that. so i think that was coming in now, anyway that's pretty much all i have to say about that carriage. anybody else? [inaudible] >> yes. >> obviously a mother loves her dad dearly. and so she was portrayed always has been somewhat of a very strong person. what influence does your band have your dad? as far as his decisions in her opinion on things happening politically?

>> she was not a political person. so the idea that she was sort of pulling the strings behind the scenes in getting him to sign this bill are not that they'll come it didn't happen. she encouraged and certainly with rapprochement between words the soviet union and gorbachev. she and i talked to about the aids crisis when it was apparent the administration was dragging its feet and not doing enough. so we teamed up with them i'm not. but mostly she had a great antenna for other people's agendas that may conflict with them. i'm talking about people who work with them. for personnel issues or where she would make her feelings now more than politics or policy or anything like that. that was done we can, for instance, famously hung up on her case. that was the end of time. >> would these be private things are things discussed in the

family quarters? >> both. again, she and i had talked about the aids crisis together, but mostly that would be pillow talk basically. >> will finish at the last question. >> high, so happy to be here to meet up finally. i just have a short story and that is i was very much against her father's presidency and not a fan at all. i was an army navy club at the time when he was president and even during that time a sort of slowly saw the part being turned into basically a homeless shelter and something which myself and others connect it with some of his policies. there was one day that they walked up high street and is there in a lunch break and i was the only person, no cars and i'm standing there in a scarlet coat and the garage door slowly

opened them up and out with the now sort of pope mobile comes out and your father and i were only about four feet away and he turned on high street going the wrong way. and he looked at me and i looked at him. i'm not wonderful charm and is really difficult not to like in many ways. that was my little brush with mr. reagan. >> you can spend five minutes and not like them. many people tried. people would come to meeting and maybe in a group and think i'm not going to like him. and you know, they leave 15 minutes later. he's a great guy, you know. i still don't agree with them, but he's a good guy. i felt the same way. we argued about the vietnam war when i was young. we used to argue about environmental issues sometimes. but you know, we would stay friends and sometimes he

wouldn't bother to argue. one story and we can go to a book signing i guess. i am writing courses with him and my father had kind of a 19th 19th century view of nature. he loved being out in nature, loved being outdoors, but he kind of got admin have dominion over nature and was man's responsibility to manage the whole enterprise basically. and so we arrived on horseback in a star in his blood through the night before so there's deadlines and stuff scattered on the ground beneath his trees. he turns to me in the side of an says that maybe nature to some people, but i think we can do better. [laughter] and i just thought, what the. >> he was the package. he was really the package for republicans. >> again, who else -- >> we all admire your courage as

well. >> thank you

[applause] >> i'm going to keep my remarks pretty brief. i'll take questions when i'm done in open up to the audience. a major stir by saying thank you at the difference you make in schools and classrooms and districts and states around the country today is absolutely extraordinary. and i know the amazing challenges you face every single day when you try and hoper nation's children get a great education and had the opportunity and support and guidance to fulfill their tremendous academic and social potential. the challenges our country and young people are facing are frankly staggering. rates of poverty we haven't seen in a long, long time. rates of homelessness, rates of unemployment. i do know of a district in this

country what title i accounts are going down, not a. we know the real challenges that poverty brings to her children. levels of violence in school, sometimes children homes and communities. this is by far the toughest challenge i face in chicago public schools. we were able to make schools themselves much safer. what children experience and communities with a particular basically having one student shot and killed every to eke out a staggering rates of violence. i can't tell you the total that took personally to talk to classmates about their brand they lost in trying to make sense of it, trying to go to homes and talk to parents of children are on a real parents who are doing nothing wrong, who are playing basketball by literally sitting in the living room and got shot or written of violence. you had the set of issues every

single day. they are facing not physical bullying, but cyberbullying that are unprecedented levels. drugs and alcohol at younger and younger ages 10 and 11 tallgrass tagamet temptations and pressures they are facing. and the two sides that some people don't live in neighborhoods where you have both obesity and real hunger and often on the same block in the same community. the challenges they're facing with all these horrendous areas to students fulfilling their potential are huge. at a time those challenges, students cannot education, that path, that mission unimpaired it has been more important. we know the international competition. we know it's a nation from first in the world tonight call is graduate. other countries passing us by. we know where 25% drop off for in our country.

that the million point to young people with no chance for that to get a job in the legal economy. as i look across the globe and competition were facing, places like spout korea, president obama asked what is the biggest educational challenge for the very high achieving nation. even my poorest parents demand a world-class education. we wish we had those kinds of challenges here. south korea is going from print books to all digital. 2015, nowhere prayerbooks. that's the competition is these days. not in the district or the state or even in the country. it's across the globe, so we have to think how to better prepare students for that. so anytime you face immense challenges in our nation to people, the time has never been more important. the sad reality is we've never

had less resources to use, to utilize. but we are far too many leaders of the local level, the state level, folks in congress to a fundamentally tackled education you don't believe in it and don't get investment. collectively we have to continue to challenge that mentality. we have to educate our way to better economy. anyone who thinks we should cut back with k-12 education or access to higher education are part of the problem, and a part of solution. i know these are tough budget times, but the effect her priorities and values where we feel to invest and make a commitment to young people we do our children and our country a grave, grave disservice. [applause] we have to continue to cite that title again and districts and

communities in cities and states of the national level every single day. it's been amazing quite frankly to see so many elected officials who fundamentally want to dismantle public education in this country. i don't know what planet they live on about their valleys are, but those beliefs will not help lead our country where we go we need to push back and demonstrate our success. [applause] demonstrate our success and commitment to what our children can achieve if we give them real opportunities every single chance we have. so what do we do at a time of huge needs and hooch issues for resources? we can't stop. our children get one chance for a great education. we have to keep moving forward to mathews each other and relationships can get outside our and decent things differently in order to make sure children who desperately need a quality education and a chance to be successful have those opportunities. we're trying to partner with other agencies across the

administration to work in different ways. and i know for far too long different departments at the federal level have been silos, haven't spoken with each other. and so pleasantly pleased and surprised to senate colleagues who lead other places, like a veto to my willingness to and partner and we can demonstrate him a bad example here we will see similar start to emerge in the state at the local level. just a couple quick examples. my good friend, eric holder the attorney general working together to think about how we have much more positive school discipline practices across the country. i'm immensely concerned we are expelling students unfortunate our children are going from the classroom to incarceration. that has to stop. and this is a really personal one for me. when i ran the chicago public schools, i became very learned with young people being arrested and so i know what the police

chief incentive got to do something better. you guys have to help us here. you guys are resting far too many people. he looked mean and said you're the problem. i said what he talking about? he said you're the problem. the men looked at the data and it was an absolute eye-opener for me. in fact we have chicago public schools for a big part of the problem. the vast majority were typing at 6:00 in the evening, one to 2:00 in the morning. they are happening from 9:00 to 3:00 when children were in school. others are dug into the data it was fascinating but we found was 7% of our schools, 7% are leading 55% of the arrests. massively disproportionate number. there were schools for five blocks of the same socioeconomic challenges. some schools for their arresting hundreds of children each year in summer there is zero. we have to really look ourselves

in the eye and think about how we train administrators administrators and school staff. the first response can be to pick up the phone to call 9-1-1. it has to be how do we help this child, reach and do things differently? are able to dramatically drive down the number of arrests. it took some hard soul-searching on our part to do that. what we have to do is work across the country. many of you saw the data out of texas. i commend texas for having the courage to put that data out. that data is absolutely staggering. to see over at the young people in texas get suspended or expelled at some point during the educational career. the fact that half -- not pass, 15% of young students are suspended or expelled 11 times while they're in school. the fact that 75% of african-american children are suspended or expelled in texas. 75% of national education children are expended versus

valid. we have to challenge ourselves in every community to figure out how to be much better and positive prices that don't push students on the streets or in jail and given support and and resources they need to be successful in class and other strategies we know work. restorative justice that to become the norm rather than the exception. the attorney general and i will work hard to make it happen. kathleen sebelius at hhs has been a fantastic partner. we put together a website comes up lame duck of which we hope you guys to look at. a comprehensive set of resources are out there. folks are using data-driven work to help reduce bullying. please access that if you haven't. we're also working closely with her to create school-based health care clinics that we know if our children are healthy, if their emotional needs are being met, they won't be successful in school. we are pleased recently to have

$95 million in grants to create a couple hundred more school-based health care clinics at schools across the country. [applause] those clinics are going to help a million young people stay in school, get the support they need. this is the first half of funding. we have another half in fy 13. we'll continue to push hard they are moana chicago two dozen health care clinics. if i went and visited them it was amazing to your stories of young people, horrific things they were dealing with at home in the community. because they have access to mental and physical health or to stay in school and not drop out. kathleen has been a fantastic or there. we're working hard with her now about better access to high-quality early childhood education. there's no better investment to make together three and four euros off to a great start. are going to invest $500 million

together to dramatically increase access, particularly disadvantaged communities for children struggling to make sure it's high-quality so children can enter kindergarten ready to learn and ready to read and stop playing catch-up in education and start to level the playing field and close the achievement gap spirit were also working -- [applause] we're also working across agencies with hud and hhs and treasury to make sure we have strong communities and are trying to push very, very hard on our promise neighborhoods initiative. the harlem children's zone. i don't think we can have a strong neighborhood or strong community anywhere in this country, urban, rural suburban if we don't have great schools at the heart. these are inextricably linked mckeith and cycles of poverty if we don't have great, great schools. we'll continue to work very hard across agencies to help revitalize the most distressed communities and make sure great educational options are

available for young people in those neighborhoods and it can be safe not just in school but walking to and from school and their families had support services and reference services they need to help them be successful. these are actually tough economic times hitting us at every single level. i wish it was much easier. vicious reality and honesty will not change tomorrow. we can't let that stop our work and stop our collaboration. we can't stop doing everything in our power collectively together nations and people a chance to be successful. one final thing that i corrupt working as part of the southside of chicago and i don't know if there is one children who had apparently gone to college and demonstrating levels of violence. because they had a safe place to go in there during the school day and after school is so young people going to do extraordinary things. despite the immense challenges we face, despite what i call

great here in washington and actually very hopeful. i'm hopeful because i know when we give our children the opportunities for members supporting creative work together and partner they can do amazing, amazing things. we have to continue to work together in good times are tough times to make sure children have those opportunities. thank you so much. i'll stop there and take any questions you may have. [applause] i think they're a couple microphones. they see one here and one here. fire away. >> i want to applaud you for all the things you listed that you are overseen in your department. i am hoping you can add one more thing. the school districts, such as the one i come from that are

trying to compete with the rest of the world by not making, but encouraging and pressuring kids to take ap classes, geometry before their brain development has reached a place for they can understand those concepts, algebra in eighth grade. i know there are prodigies who can handle that, but i think the majority of arcade cannot and they will sign up for these classes by their own pressure, but parents pressure and they don't really learn, comprehend and retain. they study for the test, move on. they're really not learning and therefore not being prepared in the world. they are also sharing their adhd prescription stimulants so they can stay up and study.

not for the high, but for academic reasons. i am hoping you will oversee some pain in your department to stop those kinds of competition because it is so different as the number on the kid self-esteem when they feel because they can't do something that their brain won't be ready for a couple years down the road. >> so i hear the concern we don't want children sharing prescription medicine. that's not something i support her. mama challenge you a little bit. one of the things i worry about in this country or the lack of access to high-quality opportunities. one of the things i saw in chicago was a huge disconnect between the number of white students taking ap classes in a number of latino and african-americans taking ap classes. he pushed her to increase access not in a competitive way but equalize opportunity.

in a couple years we're able to double the number of students not just taking, but passing ap classes. one of my big concerns is if we did that in four years, are african-american and latino students were twice as smart over the course of those for years. we simply created opportunity that didn't exist before. i worry many places, but the low expectations, to take college-level classes a great hindrance to our young people. there's a balancing act here. i absolutely want college in paris ready opportunity to take college-level classes to take a class on a college campus and take a class at a committee college they can be part of that environment so many of our students a first-generation college goers had to feel intellectually okay to be comfortable at the higher education learning environment. i absolutely think far too many young people in our country don't have access to rigorous

curriculum is something we have to work on. [applause] >> when their brain is at the proper level of development to observe that education. >> look at the three or four girls ready for kindergarten. >> thank you secretary duncan. i'm a professor at the university of southern california. i have a two-part question. i'll keep it shorter. the one is there has been dramatic reductions overall in school violence issues and the mid-1990s and many of us attribute that to the policy efforts done in title iv. as you know recently the funding behind not have been eliminated in many states such as california use to help the kids surveyed to collect the school climate data don't have it anymore. will that be put into the

reauthorization of the school climate issues as my first question. [applause] we hope so. the second question has to do with the fact we are at war for 10 years and there's 2 million kids who's had their parents serve in iraq and afghanistan. we know the kids are suffering based on studies coming and we know the schools are also seeing the effects in academics and social climate. are there plans to actually include support for those kids and families in public schools? >> two great questions. let me take the second one first. i try to spend a disproportionate amount of my time in school is on military bases around military bases where you have family members who have been deployed, not once but four, five, six, seven, eight times. i can imagine a chocolate that flight. a china to be gone for more than one or two nights.

we have two young children at home. she was sure when he was coming back in ibc shivers every night is coming back. whatever we can do to be helpful for these children is the least we can do for our troops. it's amazing i talked to folks who have deployed on what can i do to be helpful? fails to help take care of my kids. don't do anything for me. help take care of my children. this is one where collectively there's a level of trauma, a level of fear, a level of worry that we haven't seen in a long, long time in this country. whatever we do in terms of mental health services, school of these communities to keep these young people focus we know port guys have been deployed and are being raised by it a grandparent or enter your uncle. whatever we do collectively i can imagine going as a child to give men's tools to be

successful. we have to put resources behind that were trying to work very closely with military families. on your first point, so i fire suddenly took a huge hit as you know which i was very happy about. we have a significant budget request around students and schools for fy 12. if you read the papers like i do, it's a tough budget, never pushing congress to cut to do the right thing. i can't promise will get a significant increase. i hope we do. baruch's ordinary helpful having real data come asking students are you safe come asking teachers what do you think? test scores are called lagging indicators. for those >> translator: in the right way about 40 students. so be very, very successful. as >> translator: saturday of

worry. our blueprint for reauthorization fantasizing of the acclaimed survey of this piece of that. yes for $265 million. i don't know whether we'll get that or not. we're going to push kerry hired pre-but it fundamentally changed is that children are safe they can't learn. if they can't see the black point they can't learn. there are fundamental building blocks of physical and psychological health with dependent pace. if we don't do those things, we'll never get them to where we need to go academically. so this will continue despite at times to be huge emphasis friday or here to california a budget situation is devastating that were trying to do what we can deal. please keep up the fight. >> thank you. [applause] >> thank you for the opportunity to ask questions. and shelley manlove, healthy

students coordinator and i appreciate all the things you're saying about the importance of learning conditions in the work were doing. state schools can healthy students is an incredibly successful partnership and i heard you talk about the new partnerships that you are looking at linkages. i have heard rumors that there are concerns that healthy students will not be continuing and i'm interested in hearing about the department of education's community that program. [applause] >> we want to continue everything making a difference in student flats. the more you demonstrate increasing discipline rates and increasing attendance rates all of us have to be driven by the evidence, things working to need to take the scale and do more of her worry make the difference is we have to not just try and maintain a commitment. we have to increase commitments where we can. [applause] i'll take one last one then i

need to go. >> hi, tina meier and i rented macon meyer foundation. my question to you as i travel across the country and speak to schools and rural communities in a very affluent communities. overall the same question comes as how are they dealing with the situations from top to bottom regarding bullying and cyberbullying? they are such gray areas. talking from the legal system, then filters into the schools is not the time superintendents don't know what's going on and we expect our schools to start taking care situations and very hard. so i signed one school district doing something amazing, but then a different community doesn't even know what to do and i find that very hard. >> so i don't have one easy answer. that's one of the huge challenges and opportunities. for all the problems we face, there's examples of extraordinary success, but we don't do a good job collectively

taken as things to scale and replicating. the website i talk about where we consolidate all the best practices in evidence-based work to admit that transparent. we want to get the word out. we try to put a very clear guidance from the office of civil rights. the office of civil rights has been much more active frankly been in a long, long time. cleared and guidance is leading to better policies and states around the country. those policies have to translate enterprise is that the district and school level and continue to push very, very hard they are and we will do that. we've posted a number of holding summits. with the first ever at the white house recently. we're trying to do everything we can to draw attention. again i fundamentally think our children are safe if they're worried about two and from school, cyberbullying they can be successful academically.

please push as hard to do things for not doing, please let us know but were trying to do everything we can to get the word out and make sure children are growing up in a climate free of fear so they can concentrate academically. >> thank you. >> thanks for the hard work and the difference are making around the country. thanks and have a great day. [applause] >> thank you. let's give a round ofother terrt

schoolchildren. this is an hour 10 minutes. >> i'm not going to go into long bias. what's a couple interesting things about each of them. first of all, brian who is going to go first. i do know how many had the opportunity to be in here last night. wait a couple hundred people who started to flood and after the movie started. it was phenomenal. it was absolutely phenomenal. [applause] you know, looking that all of the background here, you know, i said let's do it we can dig up on these guys and i shouldn't say to you before i know extremely well. we didn't have to do too much digging to get stuff on them. i didn't know brian knoblauch to be googled brian. first of all discovered there that i am mass-producing this world. one is an independent calamity.

so i don't know whether he won the election or not. the other interesting thing -- and more interesting things about brian is he is the one panel member who has a financial background come a long financial background. most of the others and social sciences. brian is in the nongovernmental private sector financial site. so a completely new and unique experience in the field. that would also say that brian is -- he has his roots back here because he is a graduate not in faculty, but on the disney board at georgetown university and he is a world-class cyclist. so he goes uphill flight that. wonderful, wonderful athlete. sitting next to him as a friend and colleague many years, gregory thomas.

gregory is also a cyclist. by the way, both are from brooklyn. i know gregory cycles and prospect part. this morning i said that the guy that passed in three times around that google was brian, although i don't know whether he knew that are not. gregory and i met before 9/11 because gregory was the head of the school safety for the new york city public schools at the time of 9/11 and provided wonderful leadership at that point in time. i often say gregory knows a great deal about the issues of school safety and violence in this country and everything that he learned he learned from his wife. write, gregory clicks the go. true story. next to craig is marlene law.

you know, i call marleen wong arcos bester because every time you have an emergency to be going to call? we are going to call transcendent. she is burdened working with myself ever since the bombing of the office building. the first time is in oklahoma city and since that point in time we worked together on the red lake columbine 9/11, rita, katrina, almost every disaster. marleen has worked on school district seat never heard of to provide your understanding and expertise in areas of behavior or health. and lastly, the newest member of the team here is somebody that i got to meet about a year ago,

dan sutherland. dan, raise your hand. dn is an attorney, civil rights attorney. a long background and experience experience -- an outcome i checked his bio. in his bio says he was a civil rights attorney at department of justice and homeland security and for some reason he leaves out of his formal bio that he was also an attorney at the department of education so we'll have to make that correction. but he was also a department of education civil rights at a time when we didn't have much of a civil rights office. maybe that's why he doesn't perceive that. the interesting store parser -- story about dns with the department of education were asked to join what is called interagency policy committee and combating gun extremism at the white house. so it's a meaning i've attended quite often sitting there like a fish out of water because if you

look around the table there were two or three agencies that were non-law-enforcement or not intelligence related. .. [laughter] >> pretty good.

>> thank you very much for inviting me. i believe we have a film that we were going to play before i spoke so if that is available now and if not, i will march ahead. >> i think i'm going to march ahead. okay. ♪

♪ i still haven't cleaned out the clause it, i just can't do it. every once in awhile i get that moment where i say he loved that shirt. >> i can't explain it but my heart hurts right here, and i think about my mom and it hurts. >> every morning when i leave the house to talk took the girls and i think of michael talking

in his goals because he missed out on that. >> i say to myself it could be worse. and get very frustrated. [inaudible] i want to cope with everything i have. i'm here with survivor's guilt, and its -- ♪ i can't believe i've learned to live without her. i still miss her every day and think about her every day but i have learned to live without

her. ♪ >> i still am committed to the thing i said the day i got there, i was going to find my brother and rebuild the site, stay on till it is completely done. ♪ traumatizing as it was, coming to the realization you can't open your heart any more to allow a new love to come, that takes some window but when you do eight, its profound. ♪

♪ [applause] thanks for watching that and again to bill and his team for inviting me. it's an honor to be on this panel with a bunch of professionals. i was relieved when you mentioned me giving of a community perspective because it's intimidating to be in a group of people who know what they're doing to try to address their profession not knowing much about it. however, i will tell you a little bit about my journey getting involved with project

rebirths and what i've found over the seven years i've been involved might be of interest to people in the educational field and particularly in the area of preparation for psychological trauma and grief. i met the filmmaker, jim whiteaker, the director, from seven years ago, when he was in the earlier stages of making the film that you see and what is a quick aside involved in the filmmaking process 14 time lapse cameras the dirty 5-millimeter cameras positioned around the site the have been there since six months after the attack and are still filming today and interviewing the nine people that you saw in the four minute clip over the course of eight years basically following their progression from the attack. they were affected in very different ways.

the first thing that appealed to me being a parent and somebody involved in the community and schools and rebuilding our town library was to find a way that young girl generations could engage in this important event in the nation's history that they would be able to remember and learn and some very hopeful fashion figure out how to make something good out of a horrific event. so my first instinct in terms of getting involved in project rebirth was about teaching and passing our knowledge on to younger generations. as i became more deeply involved in may be applied my business instincts to what we had which is quite obviously a film and film content, i would show piece is similar to the one you saw, the three minute piece, and as

bill mentioned involved in georgetown university, and shows the content to a wide range of people, first responders, family members, to tell them what we are doing as a way to get feedback by was also showing it to any number of educators across the spectrum from teachers in the community and my wife was the head for many years, so it shows what we have and what do you think and the response across-the-board from all the people but particularly educators as well as people teaching at the elementary level from people who even charlie became our partners at georgetown and columbia university is what we had was in the film was the word gold mine and of course for me this was interesting. why were they reacting this way and the reason was, and i open the room you have the same reaction and particularly those of you that watched the film last night and think you for those of you know watched the

film was that apparently in a sort of confirmed there is no record in the film how resilient people can be and you saw from the faces of the end of the clich is a diverse group of people from diverse backgrounds that have diverse relationships to the attacks each one of them, those were the only nine people we interviewed. each of them goes through a trajectory where they have dramatic ups and downs but ultimately figure out how to cope and move on and the message from the educator is we could use this in a variety of fashions to help in our job. so from my perspective there were two things.

one was the original intention which was complete to pass on the story in half an accessible and easily transferable narrative that will allow younger generation's to engage in 9/11 and carry forward how they may learn from it and make sure things like that didn't happen anymore and the second party emerged the film and film content could be used in a more active fashion to help first responders, educators, medical professionals and communities in particular learn how to be better prepared for the psychological trauma and grief that is inevitably part of all of our lives but particularly associated with disasters with the baby manmade or natural. so, that started me on the journey of getting more deeply involved in the project. and then, we started to take the pieces of the film that you saw and engage in programming.

i should recognize to of my colleagues are here to read the executive director of project rebirth and frank has been valuable to us and to me is the head of the columbia center for new media teaching and learning, and he took the underlining a film that we had and hundreds of hours of interviews and put them in a digital accessible formula that allows teachers to pull clips out so why won't go into the weeds. i want to tell you why all that information might be important to you. what you see on the screen, what you saw last night on the film and what is encapsulated in the archives of hundreds of hours of the films and interviews that's why we needed. we made it so that anybody who could find good use for its in a good way should have access to it. and what does that mean to you in the room?

it means screening in the community, using it in the classroom, it means using it in the school, using parts of it in the school. so at the end, you can see it's out there now. if you watch the clip, if anything that i am saying is of interest if you were kind enough to watch the film last night please be in touch with us to come to us with ideas of how you can use our content to read that's the simplest and the most powerful hopefully message i can put forward to you today. it turns out fortunately whatever we do, screenings or even slyke this people come forward and bring new ideas. the last thing i will talk about all the educational concept because i am conscious of time it's that it's fairly straightforward for you to get the film from us and the vv. it will be shown on showtime on september 11th. it will be in theaters, the film

is fairly straightforward. our long-term sort of tin year vision is that the wave that you as professionals and educators would use our content to help your schools and communities they better prepared for disaster's cause psychological trauma and grief. our ultimate aim is through the good offices of our partners at georgetown and columbia in particular to find a way that that knowledge can be shared. and this is the last thing i will say that let me on to this journey of basically giving this as my full-time job for free and giving money is under interesting career path. the cash flow goes the other direction. what i found was after each one of these episodes, whether it's 9/11, columbine, katrina, other countries, there is an astonishing amount learned in the community among the

professionals come first responders, educators, healthcare workers. it's learned the most amazing cost because the cost is lives destroyed in the deaths and people figured out how to cope. the figure out how to come back and be resilient but what amazed me was the knowledge wasn't stored in a way that was accessible to other professionals. it was not made available and shared some of the wheel didn't need to be reinvented any time and that if you are interested in what we are doing and in using our content in your own professional of objectives ultimately where we hope to get to is people learn not just with our film with people who learn how to do these things under very difficult circumstances are able to store and transfer that to similar professionals so the next time things can be a little quicker in terms of recovery in

the little bit easier in terms of recovery. i think that's all i'm going to say. should i pass on? [applause] triet >> ten years we have evil about the chairs we're sitting on. >> thank you, to continue a part of the conversation, a conversation of planning, the conversation of learning to ensure that we have learned across the country and in new

york city and not listed in the history of new york city daughter of the country we can assure everybody understands what happens on that day it's been ten years i stood in this position and gave a keynote speech on what happened on 9/11 and how i look back now to see how the federal government in particular and others around the country have taken heat on the message we learned that day and plan accordingly. so, i want to go back a little bit more and talk about what i can call the untold story if i can as it relates to what happened on that day. as i press the button. okay, great. what you will see is an overhead map that looks like lower manhattan on the timber ten, 2011, ansar, 2001 as opposed to 9/11 itself and in that you will see the grid and around the

former towers and exactly where we have eight schools in the former world trade center towers in fact we had one school located in a residential building which was a day care center so of the nine schools there were there from paprika eight to 12 and they were located as you can see on the mat but you also see that two of the schools were approximately 80 yards or so south of the towers of the stories i've told over the years have become what i labeled the untold story because not knowing that, you get the city and think many schools look like the little red schoolhouse is with flags on them but in this case because they are in lower manhattan we have to occupy buildings that were for its simple from nyu or other locations in the lower manhattan aerie and the wall street area where a lot of the business goes on a regular basis. so as you heard the stories of

those unfortunately killed in a disaster but those who were rescued the story hasn't been told often we have schools that effectively in the lower manhattan area. so to going little further, what i will call a day like no other let's talk about that day and i mention nine schools in the grades pre-k-12 in close proximity to the world trade center towers and they were located less than 100 yards south one of the high schools was a high school in a 13 story building. it was property in lower manhattan. we also need to let you know that the approximate total student and staff population of the schools was 9,000 students and staff and that the disaster itself stroock on the fourth day of schools and you can imagine what the fourth day of school means no matter where you are in the country if you are looking to skirt this in a weird way

you'd want this to happen on april 9, june 13th, but not on the fourth day of school because it forced teachers and administrators to deal with others and their stuff and children and parents whom they hardly knew and they hardly knew the school environment. but to add to that was the fact that communication between the schools and myself and my other colleague at the board of education was difficult because of increased cellphone traffic and the two-way radio traffic and as the first tower collapses on fortunately it also pierced a cable along manhattan's 08 to doubt the ability to use land mines and talk to the principles in the schools sometimes you feel as if you are on an island by yourself in this case they were literally on an island by themselves to read the foot transportation in and out was at a standstill and because of the immediate suspension of the

subway service, it was tough to get to the schools. we couldn't send staff to be down there on the school buses and there was gridlock as you saw in video and people were trying to get there and also the bridges and to lower manhattan whether emergency vehicles or others so parents who wanted to pick up their children couldn't get their, some were stuck up their jobs just focused on what they could do to get to their children but that they became a challenge for all of us the good news is in a little focus on this we were successful in rescuing all 9,000 students and staff from those buildings with nobody missing, killed or injured. [applause] that applause should be detailed to yourselves as educators because on that day my staff and

i were miles away doing what we should be giving and doing a command response miles away but the principles and stuff in the building did exactly what they were trained to do witches' respond to a disaster whether it be in the cafeteria or five-year that breaks out we were able to rescue the stuff at children because of fire drills, not because of a drill in place because of this potential disaster work in place now because the disaster that might occur like that. what i chronicle to you after i left the city schools i went to the national center for disaster preparedness and conducted a study called common sense, common coverage ehud google that under the columbia and university there would be a pd f version and it is history where we interviewed hundreds of people from different walks of life with their it be teachers, parents, administrators and others, custodians, others

involved in that day to ask exactly what they did, was their mindset when they do certain things and i'm sure we can have this chronicled because as i mentioned when you have these disasters the best way to learn is to keep it fresh and have a person keep the implementation you are learning and if it does happen again others can learn from it so again go to the report on common sense and uncommon courage and you can google where to find it on the web. moving forward to what i call that was then and this is now what have we learned from the disaster, what happened since then? he mentioned in opening remarks because this event under his leadership and the staff they convened a meeting in the spring of 2002 brought together about 40 people from different walks of life all stakeholders into a room and we were on a lockdown where he said we have a problem, a new paradigm about disasters. we need to move for it being a

response to signs because we know that hurricanes have in certain parts of the country and surgeon are more vulnerable than other disasters and or man-made disasters soldier we doing to ensure they are not just going to do a knee-jerk reaction about what they heard my work about things that in fact work so with that in the emergency management put together the schools and the preparedness response recovery and as bill mentioned the documents like that you can get to help when your guiding has to prepare for disasters and once did i will refer to that on this well with mike herman whammo is here from the state of tennessee i travel there often to see how it's throughout the state they have different challenges and one part there can be tornadoes or earthquakes in jackson the the question is how you respond in the way others to or are you responding as you should so the issues that happen in your area or what may happen in your area. again moving on we have through

online and on site training schools have become familiar with the system known as nims so that somebody is in charge by virtue of their background as opposed to the principal millman de odim who think they are fire chief for would love to be a police chief that when the disaster strikes they should step back and allow the people who are trained in certain areas to handle that and then when it's finished the will transfer control back to the principle when the disaster is over. we've also had responses that have happened over the years since 9/11 have tested the precious metal as a college facilities for example, after hurricane katrina in august 2005 many schools were destroyed and thousands of classrooms flooded so many students were forced to be evacuated to other parts of the countries of that response is an ability to receive other

students as well as transferring records and devotee to make sure they are in a proper way to ensure they don't receive students they don't know about. and what happened in the planning to thousand six if schools focus more on the planning on the operations plans to ensure the function and even schools are closed many schools are now in some cases billion dollar operations so you are in operation and it needs to function in the business of learning. we also moved to unfortunate even slick virginia tech where there was a shooting on the higher education site in 2006 and that forced educators around the country with our high end ortiz ralf to test their ability to contact. if you know it's happening on campus were told the students to have them go on lockdown or some cases evacuate their taken last week when there was the rumor of an armed gunman on the same

campus and worked well so i'm told. but also more recently in their jobs and misery we have the unfortunate events, we had a tornado there in may of this year killed over 100 people and destroyed homes and several schools so that is an opportunity for schools to test their ability to respond to this disaster but also important recovery as i mentioned earlier we doing to ensure the family's going through trauma know how to deal with that and learning from past experiences. as i close i want to make sure we focus on learning from lessons learned and i found this quote that says chinese the word crisis is of two characters one represents danger and the other, opportunity to read the person who said that was president john fitzgerald kennedy. as i look at that as an opportunity shock about what we are learning and can we learn as a group when it comes to responding to disasters is first

of all you have to make sure you don't plan for the motive, you plan for the consequences and the motive is one you can't plan for the tax consequences similar to read things happen during earthquakes where many of those you can trickle in your mind happened during an earthquake or nine nell irvin. we also know that you need to use what i've been told for the proper planning prevents poor performance. on that day most principles of the school's planned before hand coming years before him and actually months before and for fire drills and the ability to organize to have them respond to your call to begin to evacuate was based on planning and disaster strikes and we need to continue to end our educators such as yourselves to do what you do best which is handling emergencies every day because no matter the scale you do it every day and the need to keep

entrusting you will do the right thing because of the end of the day you will and the school that was down is a very important lesson on that day we can only run as fast as our slowest child. [applause] >> thank you so much for inviting me to be here today. when i was doing the work in new york city, i was on the superintendent's level and at that time governor roy romer and we were in the midst of writing

letters to the parents because parents were calling frightened about whether or not they should let their children go to school so even 3,000 miles away we were all -- i am sure all of you were trying to figure out what we should do in los angeles and whether or not there was going to be a subsequent attack. bill talked about the last 20 years and in the last 20 years these are the defense that change the culture of education. in 1990 in earnest, the school shootings began and i wonder if you can remember back when you opened of your newspaper or turn on your television and wandered is this going to stop? can there be another shooting like this? think about the generational sense that if to were born

before 1985 you may not have gone to school ever thinking that such a thing could happen. children and our families born after 1985 were born with the reality of all of these events that there could indeed be a school shooting. ..

>> because there is a preschool and nursery in the basement of the building. they wanted to cause maximum damage. then we have the terrorists attacks in new york city. and on that day in the superintendent's office, somehow, you know, if the feds want to find you, they will track you down. and on that morning, i got a phone call in my cell. and it was from the organization of great city schools. followed by bill mozeleski, followed by the office of the chancellor of the new york board of education schools asking if i would please come to new york and help to look at the situation and see what needed to be done next. let me just jump to the case. that time i was director of mental health and in charge of the crisis teams. in los angeles, we have about 2,500 to 3,000 incidents per

year of crises. we have about 250 members of the crisis team. i had never confronted a situation like this. the most complex, diverse, urban school district, probably in the world. one the thingies first recommended, i remember gregory and bill sitting there at the table. i said strong, strong, i recommend that you have an assessment of the impact. think about it, 1,100 schools, over a million children, how is this affecting them? and columbia university followed up with a study that shows six months after the impact of 9/11 that over 26% of the children had some sort of anxiety disorder. many of them had ptsd, as you can imagine. 10% had a phobia. you can call it a gore phobia if

you want to, the fear of leaving your house. if in the city on alert and watching for the next event, there are many children who just did not want to leave their families or leave their homes. the second important thing was coordination of community partnerships. and what we have learned and we always knew but was under scored by our spirits in new york city was that those schools had existing partnerships did much better than the schools that did not. those schools were starting -- that did not have partnerships were starting at step one. who are you? do you know about our school? and those schools who had partnerships were just ready to get those programs off of the ground. the third is that the organization had to be centralized for the disaster. if it too disbursed, and of course there are five boroughs and all of the politic that is go to five boroughs, you don't

have a centralized system of response, you don't have a centralized system of training, and you don't have a systemized way of disbursing funding. so that you have some kind of flexibility to for surge capacity for those schools that might be more affected than others. now surprisingly, the thing that i did that i had never done in any other situation was i worked for several weeks with the chief financial officer of the new york board of education schools. because they had not received fema funding or federal funding, state, or even private funding for services that were going to be rendered at the school sites. the whole idea was what would be the funding formula? how many do you charge for an individual session for your social workers, for your counselors, you are going to be providing this. that formula had to be in place before they could draw down any kind of funding.

i want to also mention that bill and the team of us trained faith-based schools. in new york city, the catholic archdiocese has a fairly large school district of 200,000 children in the five boroughs. and it really underscored for me the way that it disaster that an act of terrorism that in a situation with loss of life there's not only a crisis psychologically, mentally, and emotionally, but often there is a crisis of faith. and the question that the children asked us as we were working with them was why would god allow this to happen? that was the question that many people had. and that's where our faith readers come in and really are a part of our crisis teams. at this conference, there was a session that was provided by my

colleague, mona johnson. what we've learned that school staff, educators, administrators, education aides, became the emotional rescue workers for children impacted by crisis. as a result, they become part of the most susceptible list for secondary trauma. if you think that secondary smoke can affect you, there's such a thing also as secondary trauma. now the most susceptible lists are those who are affected by trauma are children, parents of young children, educators, and administrators, and all of those who response to the children and their families. this was provided in a meta analysis of over 400 large, well math scale, disasters. so the more that you care about what you do, the more likely it becomes that you will experience what's called compassion,

fatigue, or secondary trauma. now it's very much a part of crisis team training. not only what we do in the immediate response period and during the long recovery period, but also care for those who care for the children. here's a quote from the leading expert in compassion fatigue, charles. he's written a great deal about it. there's a cost to caring. we professionals who are paid to listen to the stories of fear, pain, and the suffering of others may feel ourselves similar fear, pain, and suffering because we care. compassion fatigue is the emotional rescue of exposure to working with the suffering. particularly those suffering from the consequences of traumatic events. and i leave you with this one thought, i've discovered that every single person in the school plays an important role in the support, care, and

psychological first aid of children. from one of my colleagues at columbine, she put this on the end of every one of her e-mails. to the world you maybe just one person, but to one person, you just maybe the world. thank you so much for all that you do every day. [applause] [applause] >> daniel? >> i think i'll speak from here, if that's all right. >> yeah, that's fine. >> bill and i first met about two years ago at a meeting in "the situation room" we were at the meeting talking about trying to come up with some strategies to under cut al qaeda's efforts to recruit americans to join their cause. and it was an unusual setting

for us to be in the same room as certainly in the situation room and talking about those topics. we decided we needed to put our heads together and we've ended up working on a number of projects that i'm going to talk to you just a little bit about. first, i'll give you a quick over view of where i come from. i work for a government agency called the national counterterrorism center. as bill said after 9/11, there were a lot of new accra accra a- acronyms and letters. counterterrorism is a cross cutting issue. counterterrorism doesn't belong to any one department or agency. and so congress decided to create a place where small, less than 1,000 people who's job is to coordinate all of the different governments departments as they work on counterterrorism issues. in this respect, it's issue

particular to poverty or health care, an issue that cuts across all departments and agencies, congress has decided to create the one small center, who's job it is to try to coordinate work with regard to counterterrorism. we do a lot of intelligencable sis, that's a lot of what our organization is are people who write intelligence products on counterterrorism issues. and then there are a group of us who do policy and planning. we pull together strategic plans for people across the government to focus on counterterrorism issues. and in that job, my boss, the director of national counterterrorism center, reports to the president. we are really in a support to the national security staff as they work through a lot of these issues. well, my particular job within the national counterterrorism center is to lead the countering violence extremism group. what does that actually mean? we've -- i'll define it just for a bit. our job is to try to look at

ways to under cut al qaeda's efforts to try to recruit and radicalize people to join their cause. or how do we prevent people from being interested in joining international terrorism, or being drawn to a recruited by that narrative. we look at the preventive side of of counterterrorism. as bill mentioned in the introduction, i'm a civil rights lawyer by training. it's a cross cultural experience being at the international counterterrorism center. but the reason why they ask the civil rights lawyer to come and lead this work is because it is what we call hole of government work. trying to under cut al qaeda's ability to to -- al qaeda or thr affiliates and people of like mind ability to recruit and radicalize really is a whole government project. it's not arresting our way to the problem, or shooting our way to the problem, it's trying to

win the hearts and minds of people both here and around the world to deal with the issues. this means that traditional law enforcement and security agencies are very intercally involved. it's also true we must include what we call in our world, nontraditional partners. nontraditional partnerses certainly include the department of education, commerce, and number of others that we work with. mayors around the country and things like that. we try to look at domestic air ya, we try to look at how can civil rights enforcement programs, how can anti-bullying education, how can immigrant integration programs all play a secondary role of helping us in terms of the mission that we have as well. so i hope that you begin to see some of the connections that we have to the school context. my boss is a three star lieutenant general, an army

ranger, one the most decorated and successful military leaders our country has had. he has this phrase, you'll get the military flavor of the discussion. he says who has the most time on target with the people who were concerned about? young people in our country and around the world? and that's in the school setting. so i'll just you just a cupful examples to show how our work is interconnected. bill and i after the first meeting in the situation room, i went over to his office and we started to talk about some of the issues that we see in the counterterrorism world. and the one issue that we talked about that day just one of many. but one that we talked about is the issue of somali, the somali al qaeda called al shabaab and how they were trying to recruit from a variety of diaspora community in united states and europe to come back and fight for them. you could see the lightbulbs go awe in bill's mind. he's a brilliant guy.

he began to see the connections. he brought us to a conference that he did in minneapolis with five different school districts that have a lot of somali refugee kids in the school district. the purpose was to talk about what the integration challenges of refugee children, particularly somali refugee. how do we make them more successful in the educational setting? he allowed me to take one small section of the time to talk about this issue in particular. before we ever got to my session, the very first thing that has happened was a school district from burlington, vermont, made a presentation about issues they see with somali kids. what are the issues that those kids encounter and how do we make them more effective. and they played a video from a school psychologist who had done a really in-depth look at the issues affecting somali kids. she said there were three issues that most impacted the ability of somali children to

effectively integrate into the country. i only heard the first one, as soon as she said the first one, we were off and running. she said the first issue that affects somali kids and the ability to integrate is bullying and harassment in schools. i don't know if bill stopped looking, but i turned and looked at him. we knew where to go on the critical issue. we needed to begin talking about bullying and helping kids, school districts around the country who were dealing with somali kids to really get a handle on that issue. because that's a critical issue as far as those kids. after that presentation, there was a -- an educator from a particular school district who wasn't completely sure she figured out that i was on track with some of the things that i was talking about about how al-shabaab was recruiting. she went back and school a round table of 10-12 somali american

kids. 6th graders, 11-12 years old. we talked to her a couple of months later. she was really blown away by the discussion amongst the children in the school library. they told her they knew about the recruiting efforts. one of them told her he got there in three clicks on his computer to see the recruiting efforts. she wasn't sure she understand. let's go to the computer and you show me. well, of course, the school library had a filtering system, you couldn't get to those pages. so they went down the street to a community center. and the kids turned on the computer, click, click, click there was the al shabaab recruiting effort. she was very struck by an issue that was impacting children in her school district she had no idea about. one last example i give, after the round table, one of the participates there went back to his school district and really had had no understanding of the

issues impacting muslim kids and families in his school, in his community. and he told us later that he went around and realized that there were three fairly large mosques right next door to a variety of schools. and he went into the mosque and introduced himself. he found there were issues. he found that all of these mosques told their children that they could not play on the school playgrounds with they were there for services. that, you know, how the kids always find something to do. they told them they could not go to the school grounds to play on the playgrounds while they were there for services or other events over the weekend at the mosque, because they felt that the school district did not want the children there. they needed to stay on their own property and not go into the school district. he just realized, he told us, the level of communication or lack thereof and trust and confidence between school

institutions and religious institutions, particularly the mosque. he began building lines of communication and trust. last example, we're talking about the 10th commemoration of 9/11. it's really important from us from a counterterrorism perspective that the dialogue in our country be one that under cuts al qaeda's us versus them narrative. that's what they are all about. us versus them. you can't trust them. they are at war with us. step away from them. join us. it's all us versus them. the more that we promote a narrative in our country and around the world and around 9/11 that emphasizes community resilience and the kinds of things you've been hearing and people talking about all of the panelist, the better off we are going to be as we promote that it's all about us. and not us versus them, bill immediately got that and begin working with some school districts around to country to talk -- some organizations around the country to talk about how do we put curriculum in the

week of 9/11 that emphasizes character, and other things. it's old hats to you. to us, it's a great development and makes us feel better about the likelihood the narrative will be one that's positive and constructive. i'll just say this, we were in the situation room that day. i've been there other days in which senior national security officials in the country have been talking about the role that you play in the counterterrorism field. they get it intrinsically and with passion, they feel it. it makes that connection. i think people recognize and understand how important your role is in all of this in trying to make the connections. one thing that's a new paradigm. >> thank you. that was great. give him a round of applause.

[applause] [applause] >> i'm going to take the prerogative of asking a few questions. there are mics out there. i appreciate the comments on 9/11. is rita here? rita is a person on our staff that has done the work on our 9/11 activities. we hope to have something posted within a couple of weeks for everybody to go on and we'll send a message out to link on and have quite a few resources so that as you are preparing to go back to the school, we are careful about not calling it curricula, but there are activities out there that schools can engage in in all ages from k-12 to commemorate the event of 9/11. thank you very much. it's hard for me to see out

there. let me ask one question, and that is -- there you go. thank you. one the questions that i have is that we are in a tough time. and it's not only us, it's all of the agencies are in a tough time economically. we are in a position of where funds are decreasing, not increasing, the school districts that we wanted to come to this conference couldn't because they couldn't afford to fly, they couldn't afford to get here. school districts were cutting programs left and right that don't pertain directly to teaching and learning. let me go down and start with you, brian, and go on down. one thing that you think schools could do to make schools safer to deal with the disparities that exist in schools that cost little or no money? >> i'm not sure i'm qualified to answer that question specifically. but wasn't things that you mentioned, i have a financial background. one the things that has very

much encouraged me with regard to some of the new media teaching and learning capabilities that are available in the connectivity of our society is the way that information can be gathered and transferred at a relatively low cost. also the emerging power of narrative and multimedia in school. none of which i know anything about. but i've had the privilege of being with people who do understand that. so i think i would go back to my key message which is things like our film that are viewed and seen as a tool that can be used to teach or discuss events of importance or issues of importance. it's really not a very expensive thing to do. my personal experience, just to, is actually the resistance and indeed the sort of bureaucratic difficulty of bringing new ideas

and relatively inexpensive ideas in our school. i live in suburban new york. obviously, we lost people in our community, amazingingly, there's been nothing in the school. not local high school that commemorates the event with the exception of a moment of silence. one the things that drove me again to get more involved in this was actually having kids and parents come to me whennism talk about how i was involved to say we need something. we need something. my message is we have a film. and go on too long. we have a number of educational experts who were figures out how to use our content. in some ways, it's sort of simpler. and some of the powerful common sense ideas that i've heard. it's a little bit in my mind, just do it. there isn't a huge amount of money involved in viewing narrative and having discussions towards goals that we can all

agree are very important for a wide variety of reasons. >> thank you, gregory? >> well, another lesson that i've learned from 9/11, when disaster strikes in the effects of school or school district, here comes the calvary. we had a lot of volunteers that volunteered to help us out with the one particular issue. i would say that schools need to raise their hand before something happens and reach out to the first responders, who, by the way, may have -- the money mayor come your way for this on the education side, but it maybe going somewhere else. the hounds on deck approach that daniel mentioned how the federal government is more involved now. if you have a challenge that you need to address, you feel you can't do it keeping in mind that schools are build for teaching and learning with that you need to reach out to the local emergency management, police and fire officials to help as you develop a plan whether it be a

response, but also things like that more localized. the money may not come your way, but the money is out there somewhere. you have to go back to the people that are initially charged with function every day and ask them for your help. simply raise your hand. you'll be surprised to get response that to. >> one the things i'm concerned is about the knowledge to response and recovery is here. if you think about your entire school district. i was responsible for an entire school district around crisis response. it's not just the people on the team. it's every teacher, the math teacher in the corner of the building, people in the computer rooms, educational aides, secretary in the office, custodian, what are their roles in the event of a crisis? and, you know, there was a study that was done, i believe, by the cdc. they went to the superintendent

and they said do you have a safe school plan? of the 9,000 superintendents they asked, every one of them said yes, we do. then they went down to the principal and say, yes, we do. then they went to the teachers. and the teachers said what? do you know what that plan is? what? that's my concern. if, in fact, there is something around the corner, there are so many things in our communities we can't control. the important thing is right now at this very minute, does everyone in your school district understand what their role is to preserve the lives of children? that doesn't take any money. >> daniel? >> al qaeda's narrative is us versus them. our country's motto is out of many one.

and one of many one is the key narrative. it under cuts everything that the terrorists movement is trying to send around the world. who's better to affectively drive that discussion than local schools? you do that every day for many years generations and, bill, your question is what do i think schools should do to continue to drive an understanding of out of many is one is the central issue. you are the right people to do it, you've been doing it, and you'll continue to do it successfully. the more you can do it, the better off we'll be. >> thank you. i have one challenge for everybody before we leave. that challenge is not to let that week that begins with 9/11 and ends in constitution day, that week, don't let it pass

without doing anything. you sometime during that week is an opportunity to have a discussion within your school about a variety of issues and there's a whole lot of issues out there that relate to governance. so. >> jack? >> are you open for questions still? >> let me see. >> do you have time for one? yes, jack, we have time for one. >> jack calhoun, by the way. >> terrific panel. wonderful panel. i would like the panelist to comment a bit, i didn't hear it, all of the protection, therapy, legitimate external and internal caring, what about the involvement of youth themselves? because to me, one the biggest anecdotes to fear is saying look you've got a part in this healing. so i would like the panelist to

comment on the role of youth as positive actors in this country. >> if i can go first, one thing i didn't mention was that we also had a success in that we had zero hate crimes in the days after the event. and we were concerned about having certain pockets of our schools where we knew there was a lot of muslim americans attending. we were concerned about them being unfairly argumented by other students because they what they saw on tv and heard in the media or elsewhere. but again to the credit of students who basically just stepped to the plate and didn't let that happen on their turf and their territory, we had again zero hate crimes in the days after 9/11. i know the personal value of educating students before the event, as daniel mentioned, you can't wait until the event occurs. if they give in and just beat the ground before things happen. when things happen, and they will happen, you can just push the button and you know it's going to work. >> you know, i think it's a

point well taken. i worked in japan after the earthquake there. and went back every year for about ten days to do some training and also to be -- to go around japan and meet with children and educators at schools. they did a lot more with their kids than we do. i saw high schools where they were training kids. they literally split them up into teams. we had one team of kids that were cooking for the school, and one team of kids that were shown how to lift children who might have been trapped in buildings, of course, the supervision of an adult. we had one group that helped with first aid and were taught how to do cpr. they did a lot more in -- because they live -- you know, it's the ring of fire, volcanos that still erupt and cause earthquakes. but i don't think we've addressed that issue sufficiently here. and i think they also just spoke more directly with the kids. you know, i maybe -- i don't

know. in some school districts, not to be named, if a crisis happens, you have kids jumping over the fence. and running off into the community or going home or whatever. especially in high schools where they have more autonomy. in japan, they sat those kids down and said you are responsible for your own life. these adults are here to care for you. it was part of the training that they had in terms of earthquake response. i just don't know that we cover all of those areas as well as the japanese have done. >> i would just make two observations, one is that in our local community, the resistance to engage in sensitive issues around 9/11 and the associated questions of terrorism, it comes from the older people, not from the kids. it comes from the principal, it comes from people who are afraid of taking a misstep. it's the kids that say can we

show this in the school? second of all, as gregory knows, we've been working for some time with the n.y.p.d. executive training unit. i'm proud to say for the first time this fall, they are going to put in the police academy an emotional resilience training curriculum. i was meeting with a mutual friend of ours, and some of his colleagues at the police department. i've been work, them for six years. i said how have things changed here in the department and at the academy in the time that we've been working together? and he said, you know, the older generation has extremely resistance to some of the things that we're talking about, particularly as far as emotional resilience, stress management, et cetera. but the younger cadets are actually asking us for. they see that as something we should be provides to them as part of our professional and life skills.

as an outsider, my observation is how can youngsters be involved? i think there's tremendous opportunity as outsider watching the younger generation that's much more receptive to these kids of discussions and dealing with some of these very important issues of emotional resiliency and stress management training. >> in our world, i think the projects involving young people are absolutely critical. we have have have have -- we die with a mayor of a large city in this country. he realized or he decided i'm going to get the young people in my community interethnic, interreligion involved in a major humanitarian effort. they've been working for the past year, they are involved in trying to deal with the famine. it's coming from the young people. in london there's a grouping of people who the embassy pulled together there. young people are going to go online to counter the nonsense

that you see. in pakistan, there's a movement -- an emerging movement monday university to try to deal with the ideology that's caught and spread in certain places. movements are critical. i thank you for asking the question. i think that's particularly in our perspective counterterrorism that young people, teenagers and college students play the key here. >> thank you very much. the panel will be around for a while. if anybody has any questions, feel free to come up and ask questions. let's give them a round of applause. [applause] [applause]