04/14/2003

New Pest Control Approach Slashes Pesticide Use in Schools

AUBURN, Ala. — Pesticide use in Auburn City Schools is down an estimated 90 percent from what it was three years ago, thanks to a highly effective integrated pest management (IPM) program an Auburn University entomologist introduced to the system in 2000.

Now, AU’s Fudd Graham, who coordinated the Auburn schools’ IPM program, is hoping the Auburn success story will motivate school administrators around the state to consider implementing the IPM approach in their schools.

“We started out with a pilot IPM program in three Auburn schools in May of 2000, and by December, the administration had taken it system-wide,” said Graham, an Alabama Agricultural Experiment Station (AAES) researcher who works extensively with IPM approaches to insect control. “School IPM programs work, plain and simple.”

In Auburn’s IPM program, the general pesticide spray applications that once were regularly scheduled in the city’s nine schools have been replaced with commonsense prevention strategies that eliminate potential pest-attracting conditions and block pests’ entry routes into buildings. Pesticides are used only if baited traps in the schools or reports from students, faculty or staff confirm a pest problem is present. Even then, only minimal amounts of the least hazardous products available are applied using precise, targeted treatments.

“At Auburn High School, they were applying two to three gallons of pesticide a month before IPM,” Graham said. “Now, if there’s a pest problem, a dab of gel pesticide from about a two-ounce tube is applied in cracks and crevices in the problem area. That’s it. Student exposure to pesticides is virtually zero.”

The Auburn program, part of a national pilot school IPM project administered by Indiana University and funded by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), focused on eliminating the city schools’ major pests: German and smoky brown cockroaches, fire ants, mice and yellow jackets. The first step in the IPM program was to determine how pests were getting in the schools and what was attracting them.

“To solve pest problems, you’ve got to find out what’s creating the pest-friendly environment, and then get rid of it,” Graham said. “Here, we went in and made lists of everything that needed to be fixed or custodial practices that needed to be changed, and then we addressed everything on those lists.”

School maintenance crews went to work installing weather-stripping, placing screens over vents, sealing cracks around pipes, repairing leaks, replacing rotted wood and trimming shrubbery, while custodial workers cracked down on cleanliness and sanitation and even began preaching pest-prevention strategies to students and teachers.

Corrective measures ranged from simple changes — “like getting the schools to purchase super-heavy-duty trash bags, because the cheaper ones were ripping open and leaving food and trash in the cans, and that’s an open invitation to pests,” Graham said — to more involved projects. In Auburn High’s lunchroom, for instance, replacing crumb-collecting wood shelves in the food storage area with a ventilated metal shelving system eliminated food accumulations that were a main attraction to German cockroaches.

“Spraying pesticides is just treating the symptom,” Graham said. “With IPM, you fix the problem, and then there aren’t any symptoms to treat.”

Auburn’s school IPM success story and similar accounts from 26 other school systems around the nation are spotlighted in “Safer Schools: Achieving a Healthy Learning Environment through Integrated Pest Management,” a report released this week by Beyond Pesticides, a national coalition against the misuse of pesticides. Later this month, representatives from EPA and the National Foundation for Integrated Pest Management Education will travel to Auburn to recognize and certify the system as the state’s first model IPM school program and to formally commend the Department of Entomology and Plant Pathology in AU’s College of Agriculture for its role in implementing the project.

Although implementing the IPM program initially meant increased costs for the Auburn school system in terms of repairs, maintenance and training, Jimmy DeVenney, assistant superintendent, said the program should result in substantial savings in the long run because of reduced pesticide costs.

“But cost savings are not the reason we went with this program,” DeVenney said. “We did it primarily for the benefit of our students and personnel. Reducing their risks of pesticide exposure is invaluable.”

IPM is a cooperative effort that involves school administrators, faculty, custodial and maintenance personnel, students and local pest control companies. Graham said he has talked with at least three other Alabama school systems that are working to establish IPM programs. Any school administrators interested in learning more about IPM are urged to contact either Graham, at (334) 844-2563, or Xing Ping Hu, a fellow AU entomologist and AAES researcher, at (334) 844-6392.

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News from:

Office of Ag Communications & Marketing

Auburn University College of Agriculture
Alabama Agricultural Experiment Station
3 Comer Hall, Auburn University
Auburn, AL 36849
334-844-4877 (PHONE) 334-844-5892 (FAX)

Contact Jamie Creamer, 334-844-2783 or jcreamer@auburn.edu
Contact Fudd Graham, 334-844-2563 or grahalc@auburn.edu

04/14/03

For immediate release