Opening Day Remarks (as written)
Thank you.
Before I begin my remarks, please let me introduce my wife, Nancy Long.
With only 60 days, we have plenty of challenges and opportunities before us.
Let me highlight a few:
Last year, we made some progress in funding basic education.
This year, we must take the next steps to meet our constitutional responsibility — the education of our kids, and to support those who work —day in and day out — to carry out that responsibility.
We must turn McCleary into reality!
Last year, we made the greatest advancement in health care access in state history, ensuring that all of our people can have the health care they need.
With our highly successful Washington Apple Health program, we are national leaders in health care.
This year, we must focus our attention on helping those with mental illness and those with disabilities.
It is a disgrace to park people in hospital hallways. It is a disgrace to let the homeless mentally ill die on the streets. This has got to end!
Just a few weeks ago, we took action to save tens of thousands of jobs.
Now we must work towards ensuring that people throughout our state are able to share in the recovery from the Great Recession. While our economy is growing, so is income inequality. We must help create jobs for the unemployed and promote prosperity for all.
We have a choice to make: We can ignore these challenges and make up excuses for not acting,
Or we can make progress on the critical issues of our time, and make a real difference in the lives of our people, particularly in the lives of young people in our state.
Let me give you one shining example of how to do that: the College Success Foundation.
For many years now, this legislature has provided a bit of financial support to the Foundation. It is one of the best investments we have ever made.
For over 10 years, the Foundation has provided a unique system of scholarships and mentoring that has allowed thousands of underserved, low-income, high potential students finish high school, graduate from college, and succeed in life.
It is a proven model. For example, its program in Tacoma, has a near perfect record helping students graduate from high school.
At its annual event this past fall, the Foundation introduced its new CEO, Yolanda Watson Spiva. She has a 20 year record of service to young people and a PhD from Georgia State University. Yolanda, would you please stand to be recognized?
That same event also recognized the co-founder and former CEO of the Foundation, Bob Craves.
Over 10 years, he raised nearly $500 million for scholarships and programs that allowed more than 10,000 students to go to college.
In years past, he also served as Chair of Washington’s Communities in Schools, and as Chair of the Washington State Higher Education Coordinating Board.
Way back when, Bob was also one of the founding officers of a little wholesale company that you might have heard of.
Bob, you have made a real difference in the lives of so many! Please stand so we can thank you!
What was most inspiring about the Foundation’s event, were the speeches by the students who were helped by the Foundation.
The name of one student: America Yorita-Carrion. America! What a great name!
I’d like share with you America’s story. In the year 2000, she was 17 and a senior at Davis High School in Yakima, an honors and an International Baccalaureate student with a 3.8 GPA.
She hoped to go to college, but had no idea how’d she get there.
Her senior year, she can remember walking into her school cafeteria, eager to learn about a new scholarship. America showed up, overcoming her fears that this would be yet another opportunity that would not be available to her.
She was fortunate to have a loving and supportive family who made education a priority. But her reality, like the reality of far too many students, is that even with love and support, the dream of a college education was beyond reach.
Her parents were agricultural fieldworkers in the Yakima Valley. Starting when she was 9 years old, America would arrive in the fields by 5:30 in the morning with her parents and siblings to pick fruit before the sun came up.
It was hot, hard, physical work. It wasn’t their favorite thing to do, but the children knew they were helping their family.
As they filled their buckets with apples, pears, or cherries, they dreamed about a future filled with possibilities. So when the College Success Foundation arrived at her school, she had hope.
But it was a cautious hope in the face of reality.
Can you imagine her family’s joy when she was selected as one of the Foundation’s Achiever Scholars?
A year later, she was attending Whitman College. In 2005, she walked off stage with a college degree in hand.
The College Success Foundation validated not only her dreams, but the dreams of her parents who sacrificed in unimaginable ways to give America and her siblings a better life than they had.
There are thousands of stories like America’s.
America could not get away from work to be with us today, but we have other young people here who have their own dreams.
Moses Chege, originally from Kenya and now a student in Tacoma, a Junior ROTC Cadet, varsity athlete, and worship leader in his church.
Tania Santiago, from Redmond, who is Miss Hispanic Seafair, and works as a paralegal.
Fredy Zarate, accounting student, who works the graveyard shift at a grocery store to make ends meet.
Marco Garcia, from Tacoma, a Whitworth Graduate and a community leader.
Cristina Martinez-Monano, a running start student at Green River Community College who works two part-time jobs to pay for college.
Will you please stand and let us recognize you!
It was because of young people like these, that our own State Representative Phyllis Gutierrez Kenney, sponsored House Bill 1079 ten years ago,to promote equality for in-state tuition.
Phyllis was herself a farm worker in a migrant family, pulling potatoes out of the ground in Wapato, starting when she was 5 years old. Phyllis is here with us today. Please join me in recognizing her!
With the passage of House Bill 1079, we freed the dreams of thousands of young people to go to college.
For legislators here today, I ask that you find your own inspiration to increase opportunities for all of our young people.
I often look to my own family for inspiration. My grandparents left Croatia and came to this country about 100 years ago. Some came without the proper paperwork, like my Uncle Slava, who made his way to south Tacoma.
My relatives came to this nation, like many of yours, in the aftermath of wars, to escape religious persecution, to get a job, or to simply find a better life for themselves and their kids.
Thank God they made it to America!
This is not just personal to me. It is fundamental to our state and nation.
Our nation is a land of immigrants. Washington is the state that is most dependent on international trade. And in our state constitution, we are called upon
to provide an education to all students who reside in our state.
My Uncle Slava – by the way, the word “slava” means “glory” in Croatian, he never had the chance to go to college. But, like many of your immigrant relatives, Slava was, in his own way, a dreamer.
In fact, we are all dreamers. We dream about an education and a head start for our kids.
We dream of the security of having health care to be there when we need it.
We dream of a better wage in a good job, and a way to save for retirement.
People come to Washington State from many places on earth.
Yolanda from Georgia. America from Mexico. Slava from Croatia.
I am so happy they came here. I know that Uncle Slava made south Tacoma a better place.
And I am convinced that young people like America will make America a better place for us all.
Thank you for listening.