From the October 4, 1991 New York Times:
Title: Financing for a Bush Speech Is Attacked
Democrats assailed the Bush Administration today for spending $26,750 in taxpayer money to hire a production company that oversaw President Bush’s telecast from an eighth-grade classroom here to schoolchildren around the country on Tuesday.
The money came from the Education Department’s salary and expense budget. As a result, Representative William D. Ford, the Michigan Democrat who heads the House Education and Labor Committee, demanded that Education Secretary Lamar Alexander appear before the committee to defend his “spending scarce education dollars to produce a media event.”
Mr. Ford threatened to hold up action on the multibillion dollar Higher Education Act until he received an explanation.
And the House majority leader, Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri, said, “The Department of Education should not be producing paid political advertising for the President.”
The President’s spokesman, Marlin Fitzwater, responded by denying that Mr. Bush’s talk to the schoolchildren had been a political event and calling the criticism “nonsense.”
“There are 46 million schoolchildren in America,” Mr. Fitzwater said. “If you sent a 30-cent letter — which nobody would object to — to 86,000 of them with a direct message, it would cost more than this did.”
Mr. Bush’s speech, which he delivered at Alice Deal Junior High School here, was carried live by the Cable News Network and stations of the Public Broadcasting Service. The White House hired Wetacom Inc., a production company with the local PBS station, WETA, to send in a crew for the telecast. Mr. Bush perched on a stool by a blackboard and read his speech from Teleprompters that were at the back of the classroom, out of the range of the three cameras.
The classroom was as well lighted as a television studio, and the cameras zoomed in on students and their teacher, Cynthia Mostoller, as Mr. Bush made a pitch for his education program.
Secretary Alexander had sent letters to all the nation’s 110,000 elementary and secondary schools beforehand, urging them to let students watch the President’s speech.
(Note: Emphases added by TS)