OSHA grant helps train Hispanic workers
A $105,000 Occupational Safety and Health Administration grant will help UGA faculty train the state’s Hispanic landscape workers.

OSHA’s Susan Harwood Training Grants focus on improving workers’ on-the-job safety records. Plant pathologist Alfredo Martinez serves as the project director for UGA. The project is aimed at reducing equipment- and driving-related injuries and the misuse of pesticides and unnecessary exposure to them.

“Of the 65,000 workers in the state’s green industry, 75 percent are Hispanic,” says Martinez. “As three-fourths of the work force, Hispanics are the backbone of this industry.”

Martinez, horticulturist Marco Fonseca and other UGA colleagues have trained Hispanic workers for years through programs in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. Two years ago, they formed the CAES Hispanic Specialists Group to unify their efforts. Jorge Atiles, associate dean for outreach and extension in UGA’s College of Family and Consumer Sciences, helped with the grant process.

Poet will give reading here Oct. 20
Poet Gerald Stern will read from his work Oct. 20 at 4 p.m. in room 265 of Park Hall. The reading, sponsored by the Creative Writing Program, is open free to the public.

Stern is the author of several books of poetry, including Last Blue: Poems (2000); This Time: New and Selected Poems (1998), which won the National Book Award; Odd Mercy (1995); Bread Without Sugar (1992), winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize; Leaving Another Kingdom: Selected Poems (1990); Two Long Poems (1990); Lovesick (1987); Paradise Poems (1984); The Red Coal (1981), which received the Melville Caine Award from the Poetry Society of America; Lucky Life, the 1977 Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets, which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award; and Rejoicings (1973). His most recent book is What I Can’t Bear Losing; Notes from a Life (2003).

Poll: Pre-K less effective than HOPE
Despite acknowledging the value of early education, Georgians see the HOPE scholarship as a better means than the pre-K program for increasing access to education for all Georgians, according to the results of a Peach State Poll. They also see HOPE as better for spreading the benefits of lottery revenue equitably across the state.

Fifty-nine percent of the public believe that the HOPE scholarship program is better suited than the pre-K program (19 percent) for increasing access to education. The public is much more evenly split on the question of which program is better suited to helping children from poorer families get ahead (41 percent say pre-K; 37 percent say HOPE) and for improving the overall level of education in Georgia (38 percent say pre-K; 39 percent say HOPE). 

“The data clearly show that the public sees the pre-K program quite favorably, and the public recognizes the value of early education,” says poll director Rich Clark. “But the favorable view of the pre-K program is not as great as that for the HOPE Scholarship.”

“While all evidence shows that investments in early education are among the most efficient use of funds and provide a great number of benefits to students—including increased scholastic performance, and thus access to education—the public may be responding to the idea that students have access to primary education with or without the pre-K program,” says Jason Seligman, an economist at the Vinson Institute. “Access to post-secondary education may be seen as more directly contingent on the HOPE Scholarship.”

The poll is a quarterly survey of public opinion conducted by the UGA’s Carl Vinson Institute of Government.