Unsafe Playgrounds: Keep off the Grass

Captions: From left, Anita and Phil Hemingway at the Labor Day picnic in City Park; the Shimek Elementary School reading tree with a ring of dead grass around it from chemical spray damage; and the Shimek compost bin with dead grass and signs of chemical damage around it; the bin is for organic matter to decompose and be added to the garden as nutrients. Obviously, the compost has now been contaminated.

At the June 9th Iowa City Community School District’s board meeting I addressed concerns with the board about the district’s herbicide policy. The district is spending tens of thousands of dollars on fertilizer, fungicides, and herbicides from a Des Moines-based firm. We, the taxpayers, are not told what kinds of fertilizers, fungicides, and herbicides these are.

This is not the first time I’ve brought these issues up. District records and videos show that on April 28th, and on May 12th I brought these same issues up before the board. In fact, board meeting notes reflect that I urged the board to pull the accounts payable from the consent agenda for further discussion.

The meeting minutes show that the district paid a Des Moines-based firm for fertilizer and for a district employee to get pesticide certification. Of course, the more fertilizer you use, the more you need to mow. For that reason, we need to know where the district is using excessive fertilizer.

Also at the May 12th meeting, I asked whether in-house ground maintenance is saving us money. On May 12th, we found out that the district paid district employees to be certified and licensed as commercial applicators. We weren’t told how many, but we see at least one.

On May 26th, reading again from board minutes, I urged the board to pull from accounts payable payments for fertilizer and grass seed from a Des Moines-based firm. I inquired whether the fertilizer was creating more work and what herbicides are being used and where, and whether the materials can be bought locally. There again, on May 26th, we’re asking the same things.

At the June 9th meeting, I asked that the board to pull payments from accounts payable, because they spent $3,681 on herbicides, liquid-dilution fertilizer, fungicide, and more herbicide. I asked the board again to (1) explain district herbicide policy, (2) state which herbicides they are using, (3) state whether MSDS sheets* are available at district schools for viewing, which they should be because they’re required by law, (4) state when and where is the district spraying chemicals on school grounds, (5) state whether schools are told prior to the application of chemicals to school grounds, and (6) state whether signs are posted after chemicals are sprayed on school grounds to warn the public.

*The MSDS (Materials Safety Data Sheets) are required by law. Therefore the schools should maintain them. The Materials Safety Data Sheets should include everything the school uses from Windex to clean glass to floor polish to herbicides sprayed on school grounds.

Commercial applicators are supposed to post signs for at least 24 hours when chemicals have been applied to a private lawn. This is best practice. Since the district does ground maintenance in house, the district may say that employees are applying chemicals to the district’s own property. However, our school grounds are no different than city parks. Everyone should be warned as to what chemicals have been applied and when. We should know when it will be safe to get back on school district grounds after the application of chemicals to areas where children will be sitting or playing. I’m sure staff, volunteers, and parents would also like to know when it is safe to be outside on school grounds.

The school district has an 807 policy, an integrated pest management policy, which requires them to come up with a best practice policy that will do the least harm to people to correct the pest identified. It seems the pest identified so far as the district is concerned is grass, which we’re also spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on to establish, maintain, and preserve. So why are we also spraying herbicide on it? It seems to me to be the least harmful way to correct grass around trees is mulching and trimming instead of spraying herbicides to kill the grass.

I took a CD-ROM to that board meeting of photos and spoke to the board president and another board member urging them to show what spraying has done to school grounds at Shimek and Hills Elementary Schools. At Hills spraying had been done near the strawberry patch and on the potato patch. I have photo evidence of that.

At Shimek it’s just unbelievable what’s been done. The reading tree outside is a beautiful, idyllic place to read. They sprayed a monster ring of herbicide around the tree and killed the grass. It’s anything but inviting and made the reading tree really unsightly. The board and the district have yet to answer questions about indiscriminate spraying.

On June 9th a former administrator who helped the district out two times, coming out of retirement, brought up the same issues, and was ignored. Many community members spoke up and were ignored. The only action board members took was to move any discussions on the issue to committee, which means it’s still not on the board agenda and won’t be discussed for who knows how long, maybe another month or not until fall.

All it would have taken at that meeting was for a board member to stand up (or stay seated) and ask the school district’s operational director what is the district’s herbicide policy and allow him to tell the public what the policy is and whether the policy has changed from the past, because it seems obvious that there has been a change in policy, and then ask the physical plant director which chemicals the district is using and when are they using them, and are they posting signs? Just ask those questions.

The board member could have told the public and then we’d be done. We would have been told what’s been going on. But instead, it’s the board again stonewalling and delaying and waiting to get its story correct and then going to the public after there’s an outcry instead of being open, transparent, and answering questions brought to them by taxpayers, students, parents, and staff members.

This just illustrates very clearly how the board really doesn’t care about public comment, doesn’t care about public input. They’re running this show, and they’re just letting us know that what we have to say or our concerns really don’t concern them. If one individual raises these comments at four meetings and then at the fourth meeting several other community members raise the same concerns, you’d think there’d be a little more expedient search for the answers. But unfortunately, we’re left with board members who are more concerned with limiting opportunities for the public to speak instead of providing answers to questions raised.

• -- Phil Hemingway, Iowa City Community School Board candidate and owner/manager of Phil’s Repair