Thank you, Mr. Chair.
It's Mike Lake speaking, as you mentioned, Chair. My question, with a statement first, is for Tim. I have a son who is a Special Olympics athlete. We are very thankful for the program.
I pulled up your uncle's speech from 1962, when he talked about going to the moon. He said:
We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we're willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win....
If you just remove the phrase “go to the moon” and put in “include every child”, it reads very well. We choose to include every child and do the other things not because they are easy but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone and one we intend to win.
You talked about the fact that when we include kids with intellectual developmental disabilities, everybody wins. Personally, I think we can get to the place where every single child is included in education before the end of the decade—every single child. To what extent, if we grasp this concept, if we grasp this idea of reaching the truly hardest to reach in the world through education, can we reach every child along the way and accomplish many of the other goals that we're trying to accomplish at a global level that desperately need to come together right now?