States
With School-Related Pesticide Laws
View the Most Recent School Report Update - 2002
(PDF file - Let-click to open [if you have Acrobat Reader] or right-click to save: Schooling of State Pesticide Laws - 2002 Update)
The report you access with the above link will give you detailed data on the kinds of laws various states have on the books, and will help show you why their is a need for more consistent, federal legislation. Even where protections exist, they vary widely from state to state, and some protections are too modest to truly keep children safe.
Below is a more general list of the states with school pesticide laws, without specific details.
NOTE: If you don't already have Acrobat Reader to open PDF files, you can get a free copy at www.adobe.com.
2002 report courtesy of Beyond Pesticides/National Coalition Against the Misuse of Pesticides (www.beyondpesticides.org)
States With School Pesticide Laws on the Books:
Total states with such laws: 33
Twenty-eight states have laws that provide some sort of significant protections (though still sometimes fall short). They are:
Alaska, Alabama, Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Texas, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, Wyoming
Five other states require only posting notification signs for outdoor lawn applications. Because there are no other protections provided for children at school, those states are not much better in terms of school pesticide safety than are states with no laws at all. They are:
Colorado, Indiana, Iowa, Ohio and Vermont
As of the most recent information available, the other seventeen states have no laws to protect kids from exposure to toxic pesticides at school.
Use this link to get more thorough information about school pesticide laws in various states, and the issues surrounding those laws (it is the same document as noted at the top of this page).