(photo) Teachers from Ohlone Elementary School wore gas masks to a June 2 workshop in Salinas, where they asked state regulators to require notifications when pesticides are applied near schools. (Nic Coury)
As third-grade teacher Melissa Dennis writes report cards this week, she’s surprised how many students can’t keep up.
“I work with students every day that are struggling because they don’t understand concepts in the classroom,” she says. “We all suspect prolonged exposure to pesticides is causing a lot of the difficulties we’re seeing with kids learning.”
Farm fields flank three sides of Ohlone Elementary School, north of Moss Landing, where Dennis teaches. A monitoring device placed at Ohlone in 2012 tests for three pesticides in the air: chloropicrin, 1,3-dichloropropene and methyl bromide. Since then, it’s detected all three, according to a May 22 memo from the California Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR).
This data is part of what spurred Dennis to don a hazmat suit for effect when she spoke to DPR officials June 2 at Cesar Chavez Library in Salinas. It’s one of six cities where DPR officials stopped on a listening tour to kick off a public comment process as they develop new regulations for pesticide use near schools.
“Schools are sometimes built on prime agricultural land in the middle of existing farm operations. What kind of logic is that?” DPR Director Brian Leahy wrote in a May 26 op-ed in The Sacramento Bee announcing the process. “Because our children can never be too safe, I have asked my staff to draft a new statewide regulation.”
That draft is expected by the end of the year, and a final version by April 2017.
Dennis meets monthly with the Safe Strawberry Working Group, a local coalition that partners with nonprofit Californians for Pesticide Reform, at the Watsonville office of her union, Pajaro Valley Federation of Teachers.
Working group members are asking for a 1-mile buffer zone around schools and a one-week notification to parents and staff before pesticides are used.
DPR detected trace amounts of carcinogenic pesticides in the air at Ohlone, and also at a second monitoring site at the Salinas airport, where air samples are checked weekly for 32 different pesticides. Monitoring results at that location in 2014 came back positive 6 percent of the time, according to DPR data released last month.
Sixty-three percent of tests for chlorthal-dimethyl, an herbicide, came back positive, as did 27 percent for the fumigant methyl bromide; 27 percent for malathion oxygen analog, an organophosphate insecticide; and 8 percent for the herbicide diuron, a carcinogen.
According to pesticide regulation spokesperson Charlotte Fadipe, the numbers are good news, since the amounts of pesticides were often too small to measure.
“We are pleased that though some communities use a lot of pesticides to grow food for the nation, the 2014 data shows no significant health threat to the community,” Fadipe writes by email.
Dennis is asking DPR for more disclosure. From her classroom, she can see workers in protective masks and gloves applying pesticides to adjacent fields, but she doesn’t know what chemicals they’re using, or in what quantities.
If she finds out, it might mean taking steps like closing windows, or holding physical education classes only on certain non-spray days. “Until we have information,” she says, “there’s really nothing we can do.”