PurdueAgricultures
Training networks increase Purdue Extension's reach
Many Hands Make Light Work
By Kimberlee Schoonmaker
After a June 2008 flood destroyed a downtown Franklin, Ind., office building, several local government offices, including Purdue Extension Johnson County, had to find temporary space elsewhere.
Franklin Community Schools stepped forward and offered Purdue Extension space in one of its administrative buildings.
Jill Overton, food service director for Franklin Community Schools, can’t overstate the case for food safety with children. She sends all cafeteria workers to Indiana food handler certification workshops offered by Purdue Extension Johnson County.
Jill Overton, the school corporation’s food service director, was one of Purdue Extension’s new neighbors. Overton said it wasn’t until the displaced staff moved next door to her office that she discovered the many programs and services Purdue Extension provides.
One particular program struck a chord with Overton: the Indiana food handler certification/recertification workshops that Purdue Extension foods and nutrition educator Linda Souchon delivers. All state retail food outlets, including school cafeterias, are required to have at least one certified food handler employed at each location.
When Overton and several of her managers needed their 5-year recertification, they signed up for Souchon’s workshop. Common interests—Overton is a registered dietician—and the proximity of their offices gave the two opportunities to talk shop. Souchon offered to teach food safety programs during scheduled school breaks, which would allow more of Overton’s food-service staff to attend—something that wasn’t possible when cafeteria workers had to be away during the school day for training. “I like everyone to take the training, even if they aren’t required to be certified,” Overton says. “We’re feeding a lot of kids; we do everything we can to avoid a food-borne illness outbreak.”
Train the Trainer
Souchon is among a cadre of Purdue Extension educators and county health staff trained to deliver one- and two-day programs that teach food-safety education and offer certification to thousands of individuals employed at restaurants, supermarkets, convenience stores and other food-service outlets.
By training key people around the state to deliver specialized content, Purdue Extension exponentially increases the number of Indiana citizens who can benefit from educational programs—whether the topic is food safety or plant-disease diagnosis.
Without this network of instructors, the statewide food-safety training program would not have such overwhelming success.
Ten years ago, Rich Linton, professor of food science and associate director of Agricultural Research Programs, assumed the monumental task of establishing a food-safety training program for the 16,000-plus retail food establishments, such as restaurants, supermarkets and convenience stores, in Indiana. “My first realization was, ‘I’m not going to be able to do that out of my office on the Purdue campus,’” Linton recalls.
His second realization was the need to partner with Purdue Extension county offices, local regulatory agencies and industry groups, such as the Indiana Restaurant Association and the Indiana Retail Grocers Association. “By partnering with these organizations, we were able to get the message out that retail food safety education was coming and that there would be more opportunities for training,” Linton says.
Purdue Extension county-based educators and local health department instructors were logical candidates for teaching the classes around the state. “State and local health departments also had addresses for every single retail food establishment, and they do inspections of these retail food establishments every year,” Linton says. “Plus, they really know what the issues and problems are.”
Last year, the Indiana Restaurant Association held 170 training sessions throughout the state, training 2,800 people in critical aspects of food safety in restaurants and other retail food outlets, says Debbie Scott, executive vice president of the association.
Having access to a network of educators qualified to teach the curriculum helped make that possible. “Our goal is to have classes in as many locations as possible to make it easy for people to meet the state requirement for certification,” Scott says.
Statewide, thousands of individuals have passed the state-required exam and become certified. “Between 2000 and 2008, the program certified more than 12,000 people,” Linton says.
Additionally, nearly 20,000 people in Indiana attended Food Safety Day, an abbreviated two-hour program. Both programs have been recognized nationally for their ability to build large, integrated teams to teach food safety.
“The seed that was started over a decade ago has grown into multiple programs and multiple relationships within our state,” Linton says. “Nationally, this approach is now being used as a model in several other states.”
End-Users Benefit
Continuing education is essential for trainers to stay current.
Indiana’s 800 Certified Crop Advisers are a classic example.
Tony Vyn, Purdue Extension field crops specialist, has long been involved in Indiana’s Certified Crop Adviser program, offered by the American Society of Agronomy.
The specialists certified by the program voluntarily pursue continuing education opportunities to maintain their accreditation. The largest single effort involved in this process in Indiana is the state’s Certified Crop Adviser conference, held each year in Indianapolis.
About 640 crop specialists, representing more than 5 million acres collectively, attend. Most of the Certified Crop Advisers work for businesses, where they use their expertise to train retail and sales staff, farm input applicators and farmer clients. They also recommend ways to reduce costs and increase yields while keeping soil and water reserves.
Jeff Nagel, an agronomist with Ceres Solutions in Crawfordsville, Ind., uses information from the conference to support retail outlets and crop growers. “I pick up things that I use quite frequently in day-to-day recommendations,” Nagel says. For example, white mold is an area of concern to Nagel’s soybean growers. Information on how to manage white mold was presented at last year’s conference. Nagel used the information to help his growers make seed-buying and management decisions to offset future problems associated with this mold.
Changing Behavior
Certified food handlers and crop advisers voluntarily make decisions about training needed for their careers. However, one group of trainers delivers programming mandated by the judicial system. The Marion County Community Corrections facility in Indianapolis teaches a parenting curriculum to abusive and neglectful parents.
In 2008, two Marion County Corrections staff and several Purdue Extension educators were trained how to teach the Parenting Piece by Piece curriculum by Judith Myers-Walls, Purdue Extension specialist and certified family life educator. Myers-Walls co-created the curriculum about 10 years ago in response to a lack of educational materials that fit the needs of parents mandated to attend training due to reports of child abuse and neglect. Soon, Purdue Extension county-based educators were using the program to meet another gap—parents in prisons and jails.
It’s the first parenting program to be used agency-wide by the corrections facility. Last year, the program was taught to 174 participants. Sarah Nielsen, primary facilitator for the program, says that she sees a difference between the first and final sessions as parents begin to understand how to manage their children’s behavior without violence. Parents practice techniques learned during class and report on what did or didn’t work during the next class session. The program has been especially effective with electronically monitored individuals who are at home with their children.
The curriculum has since been disseminated statewide—and even across state lines—through a network of trainers like Nielsen, who have seen the difference it can make.
Well-Equipped Educators
Before they can become trainers, county-based Extension staff must first receive the training. Jonathan Ferris, Purdue Extension director in Fayette County, finds value in a daylong plant-diseases diagnostic training session taught by Gail Ruhl, senior plant disease diagnostician at Purdue’s Plant and Pest Diagnostic Laboratory.
“Plant disease diagnosis is a big part of what we (county educators) do,” Ferris says, “yet very few of us were formally trained in that area.”
Ruhl provided training sessions that have given Ferris and two dozen or so other Purdue Extension educators the expertise to serve their own and neighboring counties. Information distributed through these individuals has the potential to reach hundreds of other Hoosiers annually—more than Ruhl herself could do in the 10-15 class presentations that time constraints limit her to each year.
Training not only gives Ferris the confidence to teach what some would consider daunting subject matter, but it also equips him with easy-to-use teaching materials. So far, he has used the PowerPoint presentation, detailed script and 20 laminated pictures of plant-disease samples from the training to teach Master Gardener classes in several counties in the eastern part of the state, as well as a local library series on home horticulture in Connersville, Ind. He plans to teach the program to Master Gardeners in his own county this year.
“I’ve tried to take as many of these train-the-trainer programs as I can, so we don’t have to rely on the campus specialists all the time,” Ferris says.
Ruhl is confident that the educators she has trained will deliver the subject matter in the same way she would, necessary to the success of such programs. “Master Gardeners will get very similar training to what I as a specialist would go out and give them myself,” Ruhl says.
Purdue Extension brings affordable, powerful programs to thousands of Indiana residents each year through its train-the-trainer efforts. These networks of experts truly give credence to the motto, “Many hands make light work.”
Contact Kimberlee Schoonmaker
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