When the wind shifts and Abbie Frank smells chemicals in the air, she begins her two-minute drill: grab the children and their backpacks and head to the schoolhouse as quickly as possible.
Frank, the founder and executive director of Bluestem Hall Nature School in Urbana said pesticides are sprayed several times a year on the six farms surrounding her school. Often, the agrichemicals drift through the air, forcing her students inside and disrupting lessons, which can be particularly stressful for younger children.
“There’s been times where we’re caught in a cloud of chemicals overwhelming us, and we’re literally grabbing backpacks and running with the children,” Frank said, adding that there is no requirement that pesticide applicators give her school advance warning.
“We’re outside all the time. It’s not the rain, it’s not the snow that drives us in. It’s the chemicals.”
The private school sits on 120 acres of prairie in central Illinois and was designed to connect its students to nature. But while identifying plants and insects has always been a core part of the curriculum, students are now being taught to identify the smell of chemicals and the machines that spray pesticides on the farms surrounding the school.
The Bluestem Hall Nature School isn’t unique. Across Illinois, 740 elementary schools are within a quarter mile of a crop field and 40 are within 20 feet, according to an analysis from the Environmental Working Group, a research and environmental advocacy nonprofit.
Pesticide applicators are not required to notify schools before spraying, but some state lawmakers want to change that.
House Bill 1596 would require certified pesticide applicators to provide written notice, 24 to 72 hours before spraying, to private and public schools, day cares, and public parks and playgrounds within a half mile of the application site. The notification requirement would apply only to large-scale operations over five acres that use boom sprayers, tractor-mounted sprayers and airplanes to apply weed killers — not residential applications.
Violators would face a $250 fine, which increases to $500 for a second violation and $1,000 for additional infractions.
Bill sponsor Rep. Laura Faver Dias, a Grayslake Democrat, said the bill could change during the next legislative session, which begins in January.
“There are children whose respiratory systems are vulnerable and impacted by this,” Faver Dias said, adding the goal is “to make sure that schools and parks have the knowledge that they need to plan and to be prepared.”
The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that children stay inside when spraying happens because exposure to pesticides has been associated with an increased risk of childhood leukemia, neurocognitive conditions and higher infant mortality rates.
Faver Dias is a former high school history teacher and the mother of a child with asthma. She said her main concern is young people in rural Illinois at heightened risk of developing asthma and other lung problems from chronic exposure to pesticides.
Pesticides are used to protect crops from disease, insects and other pests. In Illinois, which grows more soybeans than any other state, 96% of the crop is genetically engineered to be sprayed with agrichemicals.
Produced by companies like Corteva, BASF, Syngenta and Bayer, pesticides are sprayed on toxin-resistant crops across Illinois, making exposure a statewide issue. But the risk to children is especially high in Champaign County, an agricultural hub home to more than 208,000 people.
Sixty-one percent of schools in Champaign County are within half a mile of a crop field.
Pesticide use on soybeans has more than doubled since the year 2000, and has increased 30% on corn, Illinois’ dominant crop. Advocates for stronger regulations worry that the increase in pesticide use is leading to more drift and potentially putting more children’s health at risk.
“This is chemical trespass,” said Kim Erndt-Pitcher, director of ecological health at Prairie Rivers Network. “This is your chemicals trespassing into public and private spaces where people and children play, and that is not okay. These exposures can be prevented.”
But agricultural and chemical groups believe the proposed notification requirement would burden applicators who must respond quickly to changing weather conditions.
“My main concern for the way that bill was drafted is a 72-hour notice to the person that’s going to apply on that field close to the school,” said Rep. Jason Bunting, a Wateska Republican who is also a farmer and the former director of the Illinois Corn Growers Association. “That’s going to potentially tie our hands on our opportunity to do it.”
Seventeen inspectors for 38,000 applicators
In 2015, Illinois soybean growers applied about 139,000 pounds of dicamba, an herbicide first introduced in 1967. However, when Monsanto (now Bayer) released a new dicamba-resistant soybean the following year, herbicide use increased by roughly 11 times to 1.6 million pounds.
Following that increase, misuse complaints tripled within the year. State regulators quickly became overwhelmed.
In 2020, complaints declined, which some credit to new regulations around dicamba spraying.
But advocates argue the drop reflects a lack of enforcement resources and political will, not fewer violations.
“There’s really no incentive for applicators to follow the rules if you’re relying on the Illinois Department of Agriculture for enforcement,” said Brian Leber, a farmer in Grundy County. Leber has filed complaints on four separate occasions with the Illinois Department of Agriculture, including once after he was personally sprayed.
After a 2022 incident that destroyed 10 acres of organic vegetables and multiple fruit and nut trees — his entire commercial crop — Leber filed a misuse complaint. Despite the photographic evidence and receipts of damages he provided, the applicator received only a warning letter from the IDOA.
Leber turned to civil court and secured an undisclosed financial settlement for the drift damage to his crops. He said the cases are “relatively straightforward.”
“Even if getting (IDOA) enforcement is difficult, the law is on your side,” Leber said. “There are laws in place that can be leveraged, that can hold these applicators accountable.”
The Illinois Department of Agriculture oversees the state’s 38,000 certified pesticide applicators and operators with just 17 inspectors. Those inspectors also administer certification exams, splitting their time between testing new applicators, recertifications and conducting field investigations.
In response to questions about understaffing, the Department of Agriculture provided a written statement to Investigate Midwest saying that “effective staffing and resource use are essential for state agencies, including evaluation of long-term need, changing of job duties, and rearranging geographical positions to better distribute workload.”
In 2020, state lawmakers and the IDOA instituted an emergency rule restricting dicamba applications on soybeans when temperatures reach 85 degrees or higher and set a June 20 cutoff date. Farmers responded by switching to another volatile herbicide: 2,4-D, one of the ingredients used in Agent Orange, a defoliant used by the U.S. military during the Vietnam War.
Faced with restrictions on dicamba, the use of 2,4-D on soybeans in Champaign County increased by approximately 350%, despite the acres planted in beans remaining nearly unchanged.
At a 2022 meeting of the state’s Interagency Committee on Pesticides, when misuse complaints totaled 380, the official meeting minutes remarked on the overworked agency: “Our staffing was set up to handle 100-115 misuse cases per season in total. The stress on our resources is real.” The department also noted a backlog in hearings going back three years.
The resource shortage goes beyond personnel. At a 2023 meeting, the meeting minutes said that “tissue sampling is very expensive and IDOA does not have the staffing or funding to obtain tissue sampling.”
A YMCA camp evacuation shows how quickly drift reaches kids
On Aug. 7, 2023, counselors at a YMCA summer camp in Sterling quickly ushered 57 children inside after encountering the drift of a fungicide being sprayed on a nearby soybean farm. Fearing that some of the children had inhaled pesticides, the counselors called poison control.
When the fire department and EMS arrived, the children, aged 3 to 7, were lined against a wall and assessed one by one. The fire chief held parents at the front of the building “for a monitored and controlled release.”
One child said her eyes hurt and another developed a rash. However, none of the children or adults reported being directly sprayed, and no one complained of symptoms in the days that followed.
But “smell can be deemed exposure,” Sterling Fire Chief Mike Dettman told the Department of Agriculture investigator, according to the misuse complaint investigation obtained by Investigate Midwest.
The Illinois Department of Agriculture issued a $500 fine to Ted Koster, the pesticide applicator who also manages the adjacent 33-acre soybean farm.
Koster did not respond to phone and text messages from Investigate Midwest seeking comment. But he told a Department of Agriculture inspector he didn’t see the kids when he started spraying and “by the time he saw all the kids he felt it was too late, so he continued spraying to the end of the field,” according to investigation documents. He was spraying Trivapro fungicide. Trivapro “causes substantial but temporary eye injury,” according to Syngenta, the manufacturer.
Koster did not need a license to spray the chemical because it’s considered a “General Use Pesticide.”
The department’s investigation concluded that Koster applied the pesticide in a manner inconsistent with and in violation of the label directions. “Fewer than 3 humans were exposed to the pesticide,” according to the report. Koster’s $500 fine was the maximum amount for that transgression.
Staff at the Sterling YMCA declined to talk to Investigate Midwest.
If HB 1596 is approved during the 2026 legislative session, it would require applicators to notify child care centers, like the Sterling YMCA, in advance of spraying.
Parks support notice as research shows drift traveling miles
Investigate Midwest reached out to seven public school districts in Champaign County to ask about their positions on HB 1596 and their protocols for pesticide exposure. All declined to comment or did not respond to multiple requests.
However, local park officials have publicly supported the bill.
“If we were given notice, it would give us a chance to put out temporary signage near playgrounds,” executive director of the Urbana Park District Rachel Lenz told Investigate Midwest. “Or if there was a youth program within that radius, move it indoors or to a different park.”
For the past eight years, the nonprofit Prairie Rivers Network has studied trees across Illinois, specifically testing those with curled and wilted leaves, a sign of repeated pesticide exposure. The group has found damage in state forests and urban parks miles away from the nearest corn or soybean field. If pesticides can coat trees in parks, the Urbana Park District is concerned that it can also reach playground equipment.
Nearly all pesticide manufacturers include labels warning their products should not be used in winds exceeding 10 miles per hour. Disobeying that direction is in violation of federal law. But pesticides can drift even in windless conditions, a process Prairie Rivers Network argues is a matter of chemistry, not applicator error.
Days after application, especially after warm, sunny weather, pesticides can vaporize into the air and travel miles, landing on and injuring or killing old-growth trees or vegetable gardens. The chemicals can also migrate into surface water, potentially affecting drinking water sources.
Despite these risks, agrichemicals remain central to modern farming.
Pesticides have significantly increased crop yields over the past half-century, and proponents argue they have enabled farmers to produce more crops on less land, thereby contributing to resource conservation. It’s also led to higher profits for agribusinesses and agrichemical companies.
However, weed resistance has driven farmers to use more weed killers and increasingly volatile herbicides like dicamba and 2,4-D.
Environmental groups call it the “chemical treadmill,” and it can force farmers to use chemicals whether they want to or not.
Robert Hirschfeld, water policy director at Prairie Rivers Network, and the parent of two students at Bluestem Hall Nature School, described how this plays out in practice: “If I’m a farmer, and I know my neighbor is planting dicamba-resistant soybeans, and I know that farmer is going to spray and I know that it’s going to drift onto my property, I might not want to plant those dicamba-resistant soybeans, but I might feel compelled to, otherwise I’m going to take a loss.”
The harm from pesticide drift can also be found indoors.
Elisa Jazan, an environmental health researcher at Tufts University, investigated the rise in 2,4-D in Champaign County and found that children may be at significant risk of exposure through ingesting dust, which acts as a “chemical sink.”
When chemical residues are indoors, they’re not exposed to air, sunlight and microbes that break them down. Infants and toddlers face the highest risk due to their hand-to-mouth behaviors, which increase the likelihood of ingesting contaminated dust, according to Jazan’s 2025 report. Because schools are regularly cleaned, however, dust might be less of a concern than playing outside, she said.
“If you’re playing football or soccer for three hours on a field that’s right next to a cornfield, how much dust are you kicking up” from previous spraying? Jazan asked.
However, Rep. Bradley Fritts, a Dixon Republican, worries HB 1596 could conflict with existing Environmental Protection Agency deadlines. Applicators cannot spray dicamba after June 12, and with a 72-hour notification requirement, that window narrows even further.
“I think all of us who have been involved in the agricultural space take this incredibly seriously,” said Fritts, who is also a corn and soybean farmer. “I think there’s a lot of things to think through here, because this has unbelievable consequences for our industry.”