Final South Dakota Assessment

South Dakota is freezing right now :-) Welcome to winter! And I thought the weather in Nebraska was getting cold. Last Thursday and Friday the South Dakota IPM team bundled up like snowmen (and women!) to do the final visit to our 4 schools. Jerry Jochim from Indiana also joined us, as he had on the first visit.

First we took a look around the perimeter, than visited all the inside areas that we had noted during the previous visits to see how the schools were doing. Although we still found some areas of concern, the school districts had both made progress.


Some things of note in individual schools:

• a severe moth fly problem in a kitchen was solved
• wooden pallets had been moved out of another kitchen area
• outdoor pesticides were locked up in the shed (last time they had been in the open)
• a school district had created an IPM written policy

We wish our South Dakota colleagues Darrell,Jim, and Jon the best in continuing to work with the schools as they move toward IPM implementation throughout their districts.

In the near future, the team hopes to have a "Demonstration Day" where other SD schools can attend an event where they get a tour of the schools we worked with, some educational information, and encouragement to consider doing IPM themselves.

Here in Nebraska, the SD experience has been a great one in helping us as we proceed through our own IPM demonstration projects! We've learned a lot, although I sure will miss Backyard Grille BBQ and Bravos, two of the best restaurants in South Dakota!

Healthy Tribal Communities Training

September 14th brought Clyde, Barb, and myself from UNL, Mark from IA State, Jim and Jon from South Dakota State, and Sue Ratcliffe from Illinois to Sioux City, IA to provide training on IPM to tribes in EPA region 7. Mike Daniels, who has joined us in both our South Dakota and Nebraska IPM in Schools projects, organized the training with the help of Dick Wiechman from EPA.

The agenda included talks on general IPM, pest ID, pest species (cockroaches, ants, flies, bed bugs, rodents, and head lice), pesticides and pesticide labels, and recordkeeping.

Following the presentations, we took the group of about 35 people, representing tribes from several states, to a local high school, where we did a walkthrough of the kitchen, home ec room, special ed room, custodial area, and perimeter. It was a great educational opportunity to teach the participants about IPM and what process we have followed when visiting schools. We showed them particular conducive conditions and vulnerable areas and what pests might be common in those situations. We hope they are able to take what they learned into their own school systems and practice IPM!