Warren S. Whitlock, the Associate Administrator for Civil Rights at FHWA came to Vermont for the final day of the National Summer Transportation Institute (NSTI).  He facilitated a discussion for the 22 high schools students who were completing their two weeks of experiential education in transportation systems and careers, and provided closing comments after the students presented their final projects.

Hosted on the UVM campus from July 29-August 10, 2012 the Vermont NSTI provided high school students an overview of the transportation field, exploring aviation, maritime, highway, rail, transit, and community design for bike/ped infrastructure.  The students met and worked with professionals from multiple fields and participated in a curriculum that show cased transportation applications in math, science, history and language arts.  Students produced final projects that included writing about the field (meeting the standards of the youth e-Zine, GO! http://www.go-explore-trans.org/) and produced short video presentations about their experience and learning (meeting the standards for submission to the ARBTA national video contest -- http://www.artba.org/video-contest/).

The National Summer Transportation Institute (NSTI) has been hosted by the UVM Transportation Research Center for the past three years in partnership with the Vermont Agency of Transportation.  It is an initiative of USDOT/FHWA that supports institute at close to 70 colleges across the county, introducing secondary school students to all modes of transportation careers and encouraging them to pursue transportation-related courses of study at the college/university level. (see NSTI at http://www.uvm.edu/~transctr/) and follow “NSTI Vermont” on Facebook.

For more on the history and structure of the national initiative see: http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/civilrights/programs/nsti.htm

Warren Whitlock began his tenure at the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) in September 2011.  In this capacity, Mr. Whitlock provides national leadership in the development and implementation of FHWA's civil rights initiatives, and establishes systems to monitor and measure the adequacy, impact, and effectiveness of programs.  In previous position he has also served as the Director of the Office of Civil Rights at the New York State Department of Transportation (NYSDOT), the Director of Construction Coordination for Columbia University, where he also directed the development of a successful minority, women and local business enterprise (MWLBE) initiative which, achieved arguably the highest minority, women, and business enterprise (MWBE) utilization of any peer institution in the United States. He also created Columbia's MWBE mentor program with the City of New York and leading construction industry stakeholders.

NSTI Vermont

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