You’re walking to your next class and only have five minutes before you are late. You really need to use the bathroom, but it is filled with several boys or girls openly vaping.
Vaping has been normalized, not only in this school, but throughout the world. According to the Partnership to End Addiction, in the early months of 2020, nearly 20 percent of students in high school use vapes and 4.7 percent of middle schoolers do too.
“I’ve been here for four years and vaping has been a problem for all these years,” senior Qvonni Jones said.
Despite the fact that this is a health problem for students who smoke, it can also be a problem for those around them. According to the CDC, secondhand smoke can cause headaches, heart damages and strokes.
“It’s really hard when you’re just trying to use the bathroom because I really don’t like the smell,” junior Ame Cooper said. “It just gives me headaches and it’s all because some kids choose addiction over education.”
Students who constantly smoke vapes or marijuana cartridges ruin the overall image of the school. If a visitor is walking around the building and uses the bathroom, finding kids smoking will be damaging to their perception of our administration, students, and staff members.
Students in the school who have been in the wrong place at the wrong time have also suffered the consequences of smoking. If there is a group of students involved, they are usually all searched, regardless if they were the one caught with the vape.
“I got caught up in the bathroom just because the wrong crowd was there,” sophomore Crysta Stewart said. “The security searched me for minutes and didn’t let me leave until everyone was searched, making me late to class.”
Although it’s ultimately the students who decide to vape and smoke, there are solutions that can help with this. In order to remove the vaping epidemic, the administration could routinely do bathroom checks or even install smoke detectors in the bathrooms, instead of just letting the situation go on.
“That is an individual choice of the students and what needs to happen is that the students need to make better choices,” Assistant Principal Kristen Belfield said.
During school, it is important for administration to set guidelines on what choices the students should make, instead of letting them decide for themselves.
If a student is committing an irresponsible action in the school, the administration should be held accountable because we rely on them to help fix problems such as these.
Running a school for over 2,500 students can be difficult, so it can be seen why this problem hasn’t been fixed. However, there is still a high expectation students and teachers have for administration to come to service with this struggle of students and vaping.
“We can prevent it from happening or begin to by educating the parents and the children before they’re caught so it’s not just about punishing the kids,” Assistant Principal Alba Nunez said. “Because they’re vaping on school grounds, but it’s about letting the parents know that in order for this situation to get better at school they need to be aware that their children are doing this and gathering vapes outside of school.”