Proclamation 5789—National Student-Athlete Day, 1988

The American people in recent years have recognized the need for a return to solid educational achievement in our schools and colleges. Parents, educators, and students realize the lasting value of an education that imparts thorough skills in reading comprehension, composition, and mathematics and that provides a fundamental understanding of our country's heritage of liberty and of the entire body of wisdom and knowledge to which our civilization is heir. One of the many beneficial results of this focus on sound education is a reemphasis on the role of academic life for our Nation's student athletes.

For decades, we have cheered our high school and college athletes as they have played the sports our country loves. Sometimes lost in "the tumult and the shouting," however, is the realization that, of every 10,000 student athletes, only one ever becomes a professional athlete; that the one who does so can expect a professional career of less than 4 years; and that the other 9,999 must rely for a living not on their athletic skills but on their educational background and a truly worthwhile academic degree.

We rightly support and salute our student athletes for their accomplishments on the diamond, the gridiron, the hardwood, the track, and every sort of playing field; but we must also do the same for athletes and all students for what they accomplish in the classroom as well. Parents, teachers, and coaches fulfill their obligations to student athletes by expecting and by fostering the high academic performance that is everyone's key to a bright, rather than a blighted, future. That is something for all of us to remember and to act upon, on National Student-Athlete Day and always.

The Congress, by House Joint Resolution 513, has designated April 6, 1988, as "National Student-Athlete Day" and authorized and requested the President to issue a proclamation in observance of this event.

Now, Therefore, I, Ronald Reagan, President of the United States of America, do hereby proclaim April 6, 1988, National Student-Athlete Day, and I call upon the people of the United States to observe this day with appropriate programs, ceremonies, and activities.

In Witness Whereof, I have hereunto set my hand this sixth day of April, in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and eightyeight, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and twelfth.

RONALD REAGAN