President Nixon meets with members of the President’s Council on Youth Opportunity.
On this day in 1971, President Nixon released a statement about summer job and recreation opportunities for youth. The statement reiterated the Nixon administration’s goal in expanding opportunity for disadvantaged youth as they finish the school year and begin three-month long summer vacations.
Understanding the value of hard work from his experiences working at his family business throughout his youth, President Nixon sought to make sure students had every bit of access to job and recreational opportunities.
In a March 30, 1971 memo to heads of executive departments and agencies, the President set youth employment standards for all departments.
By June 2, 1971, the White House set in motion an aggressive summer youth program. In President Nixon’s statement on the same day, he outlined the impressive figures geared towards making this program more effective than in previous years.
The Federal Government will invest over $303 million in its summer job programs in 1971. Of the 674,000 federally provided jobs, the Neighborhood Youth Corps will provide more than 609,000. An additional 63,000 of the jobs are in the Federal Summer Employment Program for Youth and 2,000 are in the newly established Youth Conservation Corps.
The President continued, stating that “surely this is one of the wisest investments a nation can make–an investment in the lives of its young.”