Transcription
We worked on a while back, and one of the things that we were proud of, that we think the preach that message brochure, is still a really popular download on our side, to instill something that we use in our education programs all the time. Another project that came through early in my tenure was school-related. Public schools are like any institution; they have a pest control program. They have pest control, and back in the method, it was early nineteen eighties, and I can't remember the exact year, a school district in Chillicothe, and outside of Wichita Falls, called Chillicothe ISD, had a problem with head lice. There's a pool of children, and the school board decided that that was not a good thing, and nobody could seem to get rid of the problem. They could get them off the kids; parents were complaining. So it is that really takes a little pest control in their own hand, and they went out, they got their toxic teens and other continents exercise farm gel, and decide to spray down the school, including the boxes in the locker room and walkers' cool, and just what when the teachers and students came back to school, they got sick, and the Health Department found out about it, closed them down indefinitely, lose the whole school district town, and you can see some of headlines license at stations: "We could pesticide a nightmare school building," the Chillicothe called changes actually. They ended up with a really emergency cleanup crew; they end up clearing those buildings I think within two weeks back hose and again, but it was called a classic example of chemical issues. Now, that that incident probably would be forgotten by most people, except there was one parent in the school district that about eight years later became a state legislator, and guess what? He introduced a bill that required all schools to have graded how many Gibson really.
So this legislation required all districts to have an IPM program in place by '95, and then enforcement of the law would take place by the detective structure board. Since that time, enforcement of the rules has been taken over by the Department of Agriculture. I was fortunate to be able to see in this intermediate time when the rules were actually being developed and got an influence in the age of those rules. But as of this year, we're celebrating 22 years of a mandatory school IPM inception. I think we made some inroads into the way we do have control of school, but the essentials of the regulations for IPM is required for each school. This is actually pretty significant because a lot of other states about around this time were considering IPM and trying to promote IPM; the EPA was supporting an IPM concept, but a lot of the state efforts were focused more on restricting pesticide use rather than promoting integrated pest management—the two are very different things. To understand IPM now, under the rules, there had to be a policy in place for each district. Now, that doesn't sound like maybe significant, but within a school district, the policy is like law—is something that has to be followed. By requiring the district to have a policy that they're going to follow the state law, that basically codifies the requirements within each school district, it also required in each district that we have someone called an IPM coordinator. There's a person oversees the whole pest management program for the school district, and in any of our smaller schools, it may be the lead bus driver as the IPM coordinator, or it may be the lawn chief lawn mower—who is that person? There has to be someone who's ultimately familiar with the rules and in charge of that for the whole district. Districts also are required to have IPM plans for GPS, which includes: they have to have regular sampling monitoring program; they have to keep good records; and they have to educate staff about the IPM program. And there's also a system within the regulations that encouraged use of what we call green pesticides. We had three levels: green, yellow, and red. And the system basically requires more paperwork if you're going to use the yellow or red—five ever. Any school can use any pesticide, but if they do, they make it a little more difficult bureaucratic way to use more toxic pesticides.
We started in 2001, six years after the rules were passed; we started to organize and develop a regular regional training series of training classrooms for school districts. I do this with some other colleague; this is Dr. Don Ranchi here, and doing one of the very first school IPM training that we do. This in four locations: north, south, east, and west, every year, and had school districts coming to that. It makes us really happy when we see a school district truck pull up at CIPM Auto common door because this is not a concept tool to better absorb; we embrace it. We do a lot of hands-on type training, or try to build as much as we can in, but we try to get out of the classroom and go walk—walk the school and talk IPM—and it's way more popular parts of the class, and just against it. I wanted to give you a flavor of what we try to get across to these squads and coordinators, so I want to give you a little school IPM analogy. So how many of you in the last couple months have been in to see the doctor? Okay, so when you, for all of us, when you go in and through the doctor, what do you expect to happen when he walked into when he walked into the examination room? Hoops with you with kind question, what kind of things is he gonna do? He or she going to do? Okay, take the temperature; that might be [Music] testing; run with your medication history will be taken; right now a lot of those types of questions to investigate who you are to tailor to your treatment. So suppose you walk into the doctor's office, you see this guy, and Doctor Party listen now uses high notes, you need any without a hypodermic syringe and start to ask you what you do. So this is kind of how we've been doing pest control. If you know anything about pest control, is what what a business or school expects that they expect to pay the bug guy money to come in and months ago around at school and spray, and that's that's really what we're trying to get away from with integrated pest management. Everyday pest management is based more on finding out what the problem is, what's there, and what needs to be created, and choosing appropriate treatment methods, and hopefully it's not always going to be this guy okay with that needle.
So anyway, we have a team; is that we call it ourselves Southwest technical resource center for school IPM. Initially, these started this team with a grant to the US EPA grant that allowed us to hire this lady right here; generally, she's a colleague of mine up the Dallas center, and she is full-time working out school IPM-related program. Dr. Don Ranchi here is the coaches' department head for adding environmental safety located across the road here, and and he's been an integral part of our program; is very popular speaker; uses humor in the classroom to get people to remember things, and it's been very very successful. And we try to incorporate other faculty; that's Dr. Matt Elmore, who is our recent turfgrass specialist who helped us out last year. We want to work lasses but try to get experts from pathology and programs and others' analysis because a lot of the pesticides that are used in school districts are actually outdoor pesticides, and pounds per pound, a lot more pounds of insecticides herbicides are used outdoors on school grounds, and where's the number one place that we need pesticides in school? Sports field. This is Texas Drive football field to follow the tuning here at that incident, and now that base we do have a lot of pictures in Dallas; it's not everywhere. So by the numbers, between 2009 and 2016, we trained 1136 school Independent School District staff from 680 658 school districts. Now, if we figured out all the school districts, the school children represented by all the people we train, they estimated we impacted indirectly 3.2 million Texas children through these programs, and that's just shows you the power of working with pesticide applicators. People are professional pest management; we couldn't possibly impact that many people directly teaching, nor would they probably be interested, but these folks are interested because it's part of their job; it's a requirement, and most of the majority of them want to do it right. This is a recent class that we had, and I think about those of 28i 30 people that were there with Bradley like in four years. We had a chance to give them the IPM analogy, give them thinking, and I can't matter and getting some tools and knowledge of what they can do to control pests Paisley.
Now we also put out a newsletter, and this has been going on for a number of years, and started out as a paper—is life without electronic, of course. We reached 1700 subscribers, including us, over a thousand to life and coordinators and with other were 252 different counties in Texas; there's 1000 and 26, I believe, school districts next to each one is independent of the other, so and each one has to have IPM program. And we also have school IPM website; as last year received over almost 19. Now we also tried to measure our impact for this program several times, and again this is challenging; we've done different approaches, including going out and doing site surveys and doing analysis of books and then looking at records in schools, and thank you; it was a nice train, but the survey is still a really useful tool, and it was actually graduate students here where Dr. Gould's students taking shots at the 1994; they conducted the very first study, and we're glad that he did because he did this in '93, which was before the school IPM rules went into effect, and he had 517 of the tenth of the 1046 at the time school districts that he surveyed. In 2005, about ten years after the law went into effect, we did another mail survey and got results from 500 over 500 school districts—up almost half, over half the schools. In 2016, we did another online questionnaire; this time we did it with a version of survey software that could be downloaded on the phone, and we got a much smaller sample size this time around—200 respondents—but apparently it's getting harder; the issue was on the survey people we know, but in any case we've used this data to help us understand the impact of our programs are out today. We know that about only about 20% school districts report that they routinely applied insecticides to schools compared to when they needed that; that means 94 is zero—nearly 100% of school districts we estimate big routines on-site application. Seventy-two percent of schools monitor crawling insects with CD traps; one of the one of the criteria that the Texas Department of Agriculture used when I go into the school measure when they're doing hauling the IPM rule is whether they're trapping for bugs, and if you don't have the 24/7 traps out, chances are you're not doing a very good job monitoring, and you don't have any way of recording what the changes in your pest populations are. Today, forty forty-four percent of school never or rarely applied what we call baseboard spring, which is going to the schooling and spreading it into the walls; there's not too many tests of them on the edges of the walls, but has just been a traditional way of applying a pesticides were building historically. He asked the school coordinators that took the survey if IPM rules and regulations that resulted in more effective pest management for their district, and over three-quarters of them felt that it was with the tools for improving the pest control the way their district in pest control. And one of the big criticisms of school IPM is too expensive, too much of a bother; it increases our operating cost. And we asked the coordinators into play 16, besides the cost of essential pest control and all the rules and regulations proposed no financial burden for school districts, and we asked them that they agree or disagree with that statement. You can see 65% of them agreed with the statement that there wasn't really any significant additional cost to doing IPM versus old pest control.
Now this was actually very helpful to us a couple of years ago; the Texas Legislature actually twice in recent years, Texas Legislature considered repealing to like they own the only recently configure is that principal got the years that we confer the legislatures—the hey isn't money, he ruled government rules; they were intrusive; that we don't need. So bills were introduced to try to to try to take away the rule requirement for IPM, and unfortunately cooler heads prevailed, and the laws did not pass; the repeal did not pass, and harder than due to the data entry reflects to the survey gingerly, especially has that very active nationally school IPM and keeps up with other states and recently published American entomologist article about the impact of school rules. I Who I am and she concluded, and many others is concluded, Texas probably has some of the most progressive and comprehensive IPM rules in the US, and we think that our program has been relatively successful, and these are several reasons we think they it has been. One thing: it mandates licensing and training. In a lot of states, you have MSI applicators license apply pesticides; the focus of our laws not on is on IPM not on restricting pesticide use, so you're not taking tools away from school districts; we're just encouraging the use the safer tool. And in Texas, we've actually appointed somebody to dedicated somebody to work with public schools, and that's generally traditionally; I say we have one and a quarter and full-time equivalent positions dedicated school IPM, including myself, Dr. Ritchie, and part of that. And the other thing is we've got a regulatory agency that really enforces the rules; they go out every year, in fact, 20% of school districts in the state, and so over over five years, the idea is that every school district or receives an inspection visit, and if they're not compliant, they they did refer to us or one of the other training groups so they can get reinstated.
And not all of our efforts are totally successful. This is this is a meeting that we helped organize in 2009, and it was a ladies tried yet school districts is more of the IPM coordinator, two different school districts. Remember, every district at California; we tried to get them to form their own Association, and we had we had the association's come together in 2009; they called themselves HITMAPS, which is for a Texas IPM affiliates to public school, and had a very successful meeting where over 200 people present; I think there were somewhere around 150 or so school districts out of the 1,000 black schools issued to the stage—a very good turnout of school districts for this. And this group went on and kept meeting for several years, but it has been petered out, and we we decided we didn't; we wanted the main thing we were shooting for here with sustainability; we wanted a program that would be self-sustaining, and we hope this group would be self-sustaining, but it turned out not to be. And we think that we talked about this a lot; we hit a lot of the reason is that schools are not used to having people in this kind of position be in a professional association; they're expected to be on school, you know, seven days a week, and takers any emergencies; is very difficult find volunteers more than these ranks that want to give time to helping run an association. We said that's the best explanation we can get what we see with the people that evolved here. So anyway, we think that we made a valiant effort here, but I'm not sure if this is going to be revived or not.