July 7th IPM Coalition

We had our third IPM coalition meeting of the year yesterday. We were joined by OPS and LPS, as well as EPA, UNL Extension, tribal, and pest management professional representatives.

Our guest speaker was Mark Shour, who works in the Pesticide Safety Education Program and IPM at IA State University, and with whom Clyde and I have been working in South Dakota. He came to talk about his work with IPM in Iowa Schools. He covered survey data taken from polling Iowa schools about their pesticide practices, and IPM pilot programs he conducted for the interior (4 districts) and turf and landscape (5 districts) areas of the schools. He also discussed a Midwest IPM workshop that was conducted in 2004 by and for Extension individuals from Midwestern states. Participants were individuals who were already doing IPM in their states (who gave presentations), and people who were interested in starting IPM programs. Finally, Mark explained that he did IPM training for districts that requested it.

We also discussed an overview of the first demonstrations at Lincoln and Omaha, with both districts expressing that they felt they learned a lot and will be following through on suggestions made for things found during the walkthrough. We also reported on the upcoming in-services that we'll be doing at LPS (Custodial and Food Service) and OPS (food service) in August. We'll be doing presentations about general IPM, as well as specific pests such as cockroaches and mice.

Mike Daniels from the Winnebago tribe spoke about a tribal nations conference being held in September. As part of that, Barb, Clyde, Stephen, Mark and I will be doing presentations on various IPM issues. Other parts of the conference will include information about healthy homes, including topics such as lead and asbestos. Mike also mentioned that he had bought 500 lice combs in bulk that he is going to distribute to school nurses on the reservation as well as other places that would be conducive to head to head contact among children, such as daycares and swimming pools. Giving out these combs will help reduce embarrassment children and parents may experience when they have to go and buy them in the store. Also, he received the combs for about $1.10 apiece, as opposed to drugstore costs of around $10-15 for a comb.

Our next coalition meeting will be on October 6 and we'll be welcoming Tom Green from the IPM Institute to talk about IPM Star Certification.