MARGARET BRENNAN: –one of the things you’re floating is this idea of creating a Department of Children–

MARIANNE WILLIAMSON: Children and Youth, yes.

MARGARET BRENNAN: –how is this different than what the Education Department does and what is it that you’re actually proposing?

MARIANNE WILLIAMSON: Well, the Education Department gets about sixty-eight billion dollars in the budget and then within HHS, there is also the agency of children and working– excuse me, children and families that gets about forty-eight billion dollars. Now, education is extremely important, but we have children who are traumatized before they even reach– before they even reach preschool. We have a relatively high infant mortality rate. We have problems that go beyond the things that are already covered. We have problems with the fact that children have PTSD. Millions of American children have PTSD that is considered as severe as that of returning veteran from Afghanistan and Iraq. We have millions of American children who go to school every day–elementary school students who are asking their teachers if maybe they have some food for them. We have American children who go to classrooms where there aren’t even the adequate school supplies with which to teach a child to read and if the child cannot learn to read by the age of eight, the high school graduation a– possibility– probability is drastically decreased and the chances of high– of incarceration are drastically increased. So, we need a holistic perspective. We need more than just educational funding. We need wraparound services. We need trauma-informed education. We need to deal with the nutrition of our children, the high poverty rates, the violence in our schools, the– the trauma-informed education. There are so many issues for the whole child that need to be addressed, as a–