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Geotechnical News • March 2012
ASFE NEWS
Engineering students from the New
Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT)
served as mentors one day a week,
encouraging students to read.
ASFE-Member Firm
Fugro Consul-
tants
, an international geoprofessional
consultancy, sponsored Engineer
Better Readers at Longfellow Elemen-
tary in Houston, TX, where the firm’s
U.S. operations are based. There,
the children who read the most also
improved their reading comprehen-
sion and retention, with a genuinely
impressive 57% of them showing
growth on the Stanford Achievement
Test Series, Tenth Edition (Stanford
10). According to the school, “These
students were highly motivated to
achieve at higher levels because they
truly wanted to earn points every time
they took an Accelerated Reader test.”
According to the Foundation’s pro-
gram director, Patty Bain Bachner,
“Powerful incentives are needed to
encourage kids to read. Then, once the
kids experience the joys of reading,
going for the points is a pleasurable
challenge. Kids were reading on the
buses to and from school, during
lunch, and at recess. We believe that
the addition of mentors can magnify
the overall effect, because mentors
give the kids an extra incentive to
read, so they can impress their men-
tors and discuss what they’ve read
with them.” Ms. Bachner indicated
that the Newark and Houston pro-
grams both have been renewed for the
2011-12 school year, with additional
pilots being considered in four to five
other locations. She said that the pro-
gram focuses on elementary schools
where a high proportion of students
receive free or reduced lunches,
“because these are the kids most at
risk. A secondary objective of the
program is to interest kids in engineer-
ing as a career, not by urging them to
get involved in math and science, but
rather by exposing them to engineers
who can tell them how much they like
what they do. Still, first and foremost,
the engineer-mentors’ principal role
is to encourage kids to read and help
them do it, in service to the future of
their communities. If we continue to
achieve results like this – and we have
every reason to believe we will – it
could change how we get kids to read
in America and we’d finally have a
program that works.”
For more information about the Engi-
neering Better Readers program and
the Engineers’ Leadership Foundation,
visit
or
contact the organization at
or 301/588-6650.
Huge prevailing-wage victory in
Pennsylvania
In a stunning reversal of opinion,
Pennsylvania’s Department of Labor
& Industry has ruled in an October 6,
2011 letter that CoMET personnel are
NOT
subject to the state’s prevailing-
wage law. Hats off to
Dave Charles
(
Duffield Associates
),
Joe Hughes
(
David Blackmore & Associates
), and
Ward McMasters
(
Earth Engineer-
ing
) for leading the resistance! Obtain
a copy of the letter by sending your
request to
What’s old is new again: It’s
time to revisit ASFE White
Paper No. 2
“This
ASFE White Paper
has been
developed particularly to help estab-
lish realistic estimates of public-sector
costs that might otherwise be calcu-
lated improperly or go overlooked.
One of the
White Paper’s
philosophi-
cal underpinnings holds that, because
the public owns all government
agencies, all government costs must
be considered in order to accurately
assess the public’s real cost of a given
government service. For example,
many state and local governments
assign their core human-resources
management tasks to a central
division, office, or department that
provides overall jurisdictional support.
As a consequence, the budget of the
agency that employs design engineers
could show a zero expense for human
resources, even though the “owner”
of that agency – the public – provides
and pays for all the agency’s human-
resources
management needs, just as the owners
of private-sector organizations do. In
other words, while payment may come
from different pockets, all payments,
including those for hidden taxes, come
from John Q. Public’s pants.”
Does that sound like music to your
ears? Do you believe, as various
studies have shown, that the private
sector can accomplish public-sector
design faster, more effectively, and for
less money than the public sector? Or
do you believe, as other studies have
shown, that the public sector can do it
for less?
But there’s something fishy about
those “other studies,” because they
fail to consider the cost of centralized
services, like HR, just as they forget
the cost of legal defense (paid for by
John Q. Citizen), as well as the cost
of professional-liability insurance
pay-outs (good old John Q. covers all
losses). Unquestionably, public agen-
cies need top-flight geoprofessionals
to manage projects, but do they need
huge design staffs that get paid year-
in and year-out no matter what the
workload?
ASFE developed
White Paper No. 2
about a dozen years ago to identify all
the costs associated with public-sector
design, to help effect the apples-to-
apples comparisons that voters need to
make informed decisions. It’s a great
piece of work, White Paper No. 2. You
might want to take a look and print out
copies for those with a genuine need
to know. It’s available free at www.
asfe.org.
Two new quality-assurance
messages from the CoMET
committee
“Done right, quality assurance (QA)
can save time and money; prevent
claims and disputes; and reduce risks.
Many owners don’t do QA right
because they follow bad advice.” So
say two new “message” documents –
one for owners; the other for archi-
tects, civil engineers, and structural
