How Schools are Preventing Students From Vaping

Over the last few years, vaping has taken over from smoking. For a while, when vapes were first released and marketed to the public, they were lauded as a healthy alternative to cigarettes. Unfortunately, though, the science doesn’t back these claims up. While it is indeed true that vapes are less harmful than cigarettes, they can still be terrible for your health.

Because vaping has become so common, young people tend to incline more toward vaping than they do cigarettes. Cigarettes are considered dirty, smelly, and dangerous by many of today’s youth. An added danger of vaping is that it’s possible for young people to buy vape cartridges that actually contain Cannabis, which means they can use them to get high.

Schools across America have cracked down on vaping, because of how unhealthy it is. This post will tell you how they are doing this:

person smoking

Vape Sensors

Vape sensors are one of the most effective ways of preventing students from vaping. Most students go into bathrooms to vape. Schools are able to put sensors up in bathrooms, which provide vape detection with text alerts, meaning messages are sent to teachers’ phones when vaping has been detected. Teachers are given a detector ID, which helps them to identify where students are vaping. More often than not, hall monitors are the ones who’re texted, so they can move in on the students that are vaping quickly and catch them.

Metal Detectors

In some schools, metal detectors are present. More and more metal detectors are starting to be introduced into U.S. schools because of the threat of school shooters. An additional bonus of having metal detectors is that they can also be used to find vapes. Vapes are usually made from metal or have metal components. They nearly always set off alarms when they pass through them. The only vapes that don’t are disposable plastic ones. Metal detectors can help teachers to crack down on the number of students that are vaping at school.

Encouraging Reports

One of the most effective things that schools can do to crack down on vaping is to encourage students to tell teachers about each other. It is usually only students who are badly behaved that vape, since sensible, well-behaved students don’t tend to incline towards things like that. By virtue of vaping at school, it shows that the student vaping does not care. However, other students do care. One good way of getting students to report each other is to offer gifts and bonuses (like free school meals or prizes) to students who turn in people who have been vaping.

Hall Monitors

However, you can’t just rely on students to tell on one another. You also need to employ hall monitors, ideally adults. Some schools employ student hall monitors. However, student hall monitors can be pressured by other students into not reporting them for vaping and can misuse their powers. Adult hall monitors, employed solely to find students who’re behaving badly, will be able to do a much better job of catching and identifying vapers. As most students vape in toilets, you can ask hall monitors to hang around bathrooms, and monitor them on cameras (as in their entrances) to see if large groups of students go into them.

Searching Students

In some schools, it is common for students to be searched upon entry. This only usually takes place if violence is a problem in the school district,  or if gang crime is a problem there. You can search students if they are reported to you for vaping, though. Searching students usually have to be done under the supervision of the police, though. If you suspect that a student has been vaping then you may want to contact their parents instead of the police, since vaping is not a crime, unless they are vaping Cannabis or have been using drugs as well.

Bag Checks

Finally, while you are not able to just randomly search students without a reason, most schools are allowed to check the bags of their students before they enter. If vaping is a big problem in your school, then you can set up checkpoints throughout the school, where students have to show teachers what’s inside their bags. Doing this could be a very effective way of rooting vaping out of your school. You cannot control what students do out of school, but you can stop them from vaping at school, which might help to bring a stop to their addiction.

Vaping is not good for the health of young people. If you are responsible for running a school, then you need to take steps to prevent them from vaping at school, and outside of school too. You may, in addition to everything listed here, want to hold workshops explaining the harm that vaping can do. Educating students is a good way to get them to stop.

Krystal | Sunny Sweet Days
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