Welcome to the New York State IPM
conference. This is the sixth
annual conference that our program
has organized. The theme varies each year
and this year we have chosen the theme of school IPM.
Of course what's unusual about this year
is that the conference is
virtual, split into two half days.
A few more logistics, the
chat box is where you enter any
questions that you have for speakers
or concerns about procedures.
And later you will receive,
for those of you who are certified
applicators,
and have registered as such,
you will receive
after the conference at a later date your
DEC certificates for both
dates. They are separate for the two
dates. And also we have a certificate
from our program
of participation and if you fill out the
evaluation which you will also be
sent after the conference you will
get a FIT tool.
Both days of the conference
are being recorded and they will end up
on the New York State IPM website.
We have to caption them first,
that's required,
that'll take a while. Possibly by the
end of October they'll be on the website.
The breakout groups today will not be recorded.
Let's get slides going here.
Okay, this is a slide which was shown last
week
and I just want to recap some
highlights
from last week.
And we started with a presentation by
our new director of the IPM program
Alejandro Calixto and
he gave an excellent quick summary
of the history of integrated pest
management.
And then looking toward where we are now
discussed that the diversity
is a strength for IPM. The communities of
people that we work with, our
stakeholders,
are increasingly diverse in many ways
and also the the people who work for us
in a variety of contexts
and offering the front lines of pest
problems come from diverse backgrounds.
So it's increasingly important that
for successful IPM which involves
collaboration, communication,
that we create respective relationships
and
part of that, of course, is recognizing
that cultural diversity is a strength
from which we can draw
for pest management. And then he
summarizes
several take-home messages where IPM
both in the agricultural and urban
areas are going or need to go and
again an emphasis there on that
diversity is a strength for uh we should view it
as a strength for the adoption
of IPM.
Then our keynote speaker
last week and for the whole
conference was Dr.
Lorraine Maxwell, emeritus professor from
Cornell University.
Her area of research
has been how school buildings, the
physical plant,
impacts student outcomes and the title
of her presentation
was Healthy Environments for Learning.
This is her outline of why the physical
environment of schools is important
and the psychological processes related
to learning
and including
particularly the relationship to
building design and quality
and the outcomes you know including
student perceptions
and the relationship with building
conditions. And again these plus all the
presentations will be available
the recordings of these will be
available.
She referred to a collection of research which indicated
that the quality of school buildings is able
to predict academic performance
of students and attendance for both
elementary and secondary schools.
And then she looked at her comprehensive
research which
dealt with a large number
of middle schools in New York City where
she investigated the role
of school building condition in student
attendance
and academic achievement.
Her summary of that New York City study
was that
students' perception of the school's
social environment is in part shaped by
the physical quality of the building
and the social learning environment
affects the student attendance
and also academic achievement and
demographic factors do play a role,
but school building quality still is an
important contributing factor
to the learning environment.
So her main
take-home message again was the physical
environment of schools matters and that
is a very important context for which we
apply
pest management within schools.
We then had a series of four
presentations
under the theme of the status of school
IPM in New York State
within schools within New
York State.
I gave the results of both formal and
informal surveys over the last 20 years
that our program partnering with many
others
has done and these were the
take-home points that I drove from those
surveys that the use of minimum risk
pesticides
is increasing by schools and to be
kept tracked of and assisted with that,
food in non-cafeteria locations seems to
be a problematic situation,
most schools do not have a pest
management advisory committee,
Chapter 85 implementation and associated
with that is
assistance in turf and grounds
management is an issue
for many school districts in the
state.
Geese are an increasing problem for New
York State schools.
There's been a significant drop in
school staff that are certified
applicators and what's the impact of that
and also that there is interest in
cooperative bids and services for pest
management related 
services and equipment, and for the
development of webinars.
The next presentation in this session
was by Daryl Andreades
with the New York State Department of Education describing the
regulations relative to pest management
that
SED is responsible for.
She referred to the New York State Board
of Regents' Bill of Rights
for children which includes a statement
that every child
has a right to an environmentally safe
and healthy environment
which is clean and in good repair, plus a
right to know about this.
She spent quite a bit of time
with all the details
of the commissioner's regulations,
I'm not going through all those
slides of course, but that
emphasizing, of course, that the key point
that IPM has
within those regulations.
And then our two major state laws which the SED has a
responsibility for administering The
Child Safe Playing Field Act
and the pesticide notification
act.
Finally she's talked about SED's
Green Ribbon Schools program
plus the url and other contacts
there, where to find out more information about
that program.
The third presentation in this session was by Claire Barnett
the executive director of the Healthy
Schools Network
and the title of her
presentation was Pesticides in Schools in
New York State: What's in Place and
What's Next in the Pandemic
Era?
And she emphasized that
children are not just little adults and
that needs to be kept in mind,
the bulk of research supporting that, as well
that schools are just not little offices.
And she provided a list of resources
which Healthy Schools recommends
for learning more about
the maintaining a healthy school for
your children and staff.
The final presentation in that session
was by Fred Koelbel,
director of facilities at Port Jefferson
School District.
Some of his highlights was that
communication is important
and don't assume that you are
always communicating. What you say
may not be what they, your audience,
hears.
He talked about the impact from the last 
10 to 20 years of various state
activities,
on his role as a school facilities
manager, 
and that, of course, the journey continues
both in needs of communication,
unanticipated changes in our social
environment,
such as Covid-19, increasing public use
of school buildings, and making use of
teachable moments.
So that's a quick overview of where we have been
in the
with the first half of our conference.
Looking toward today
we'll start off with a virtual
tabling event
which I will explain shortly what we
mean by that
and then we will have three
presentations
under the session entitled What We're
Doing -
Community Interventions and those are
really
kind of priming the pump if you will for
our
our breakout groups.
Notice I have in bold print
that we have moved the break due to
popular demand from last week to earlier
in the day and so the break now instead
of after our three speakers
during the What We're Doing - Community
Interventions
session will be before Bobby Corrigan,
the third
speaker. So that break will be from
10:45 to 11, a change in the agenda.
The bios
of these three speakers plus the
speakers from last week
will be, if they're not already
on the conference website.
So let me describe a little bit
this virtual tabling event.
and looks like I'm not taking as much
time as I anticipated I would in the
welcome so we can have
some more time with the tabling event
for times of questions because we have a
a full slate
of eight presenters.
If this was a face-to-face meeting as we
originally were planning
in April, we had offered
partners tables to
be out in the halls and adjacent rooms
where
they could show their wares and describe
their services that they provide
schools specially related to pest
management in school.
In lieu of that we are going to try a
virtually
a virtual tabling event, speed
tabling if you will,
and so we have eight presenters
and they will each presenter
will have five minutes, and their slides are timed,
to describe what their organization
offers schools, again particularly
associated with
IPM in schools. Any questions
that you have for the presenters enter
in the chat box.
Those will not be addressed during the
individual presentations, 
but in the time which we have
afterwards
before we enter into the
speaker session.
