Monday, July 30, 2012

Tribal In-services

Last week, Clyde and I met with Christina Lee, the new Pesticide Circuit Rider for the Winnebago and Omaha tribes in NE, and conducted IPM in-services for the 4 tribal schools we have been working with.

Each school had custodial or kitchen staff representatives with whom we discussed pest problems and conducive conditions, and we also provided them with a variety of print resources, including two identification books for common pests (Inspector's Field Guide for Pest Identification and Common Pests Found in Schools and Day Care Centers) and UNL publications on cockroaches, IPM in sensitive environments, and ants (one-node and two node). After each discussion, we toured the school, visiting areas that were more likely to have pests or conditions conducive to them, such as kitchens, custodial closets, and teacher's lounges.

We are going to revise and update the previous recommendations for each school and then prioritize which issues are most important to address in each location.

Thursday, July 19, 2012

Half-Day IPM Coalition Meeting

It's been awhile since I've updated my blog, but we have quite a few IPM events coming up, so I hope to remedy that!

Yesterday we had our second annual half-day educational workshop for our IPM coalition. We had participants from OPS, EPA, Lancaster County Health Department, NDA, USDA-APHIS, tribes, and UNL Extension.

Omaha Public Schools gave an excellent presentation about their use of IPM from its conception to the current goal of getting IPM Star Certification for their 84 schools by 2016. The thorough and dedicated job this school district is doing generated a lot of great discussion amongst the group!

In addition, Clyde and I updated coalition members about our IPM assessments in day cares last year and our upcoming in-service with the tribes in Winnebago and Omaha next week. Katie Howard spoke about EPA's IPM program, Dennis Ferraro talked about IPM techniques such as exclusion to pest-proof the perimeter of  buildings, and Stephen Vantassel talked about birds, ground squirrels, pocket gophers, moles, and voles, and how best to control these pests. The workshop was very informative and engaging, resulting in a lot of interest and questions. We will also be distributing the PDF versions of the Powerpoint presentations to the coalition email list for those who couldn't join us.

On October 24th, we will have our last IPM coalition meeting of the year. Our speakers will be Lincoln Public Schools, who will, like OPS did at this meeting, discuss use of IPM in their district.