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At last week’s School Board meeting, Rockbridge Superintendent Phillip Thompson updated the Board or the district’s efforts to stop student vaping.
“When we talk about these big topics in our school system, one we’ve talked about quite a bit is vaping. Vaping is prevalent in our society, it’s prevalent in our community,” said Thompson.
“If adults choose to do it, that’s their decision. We, as a school division, are concerned about vaping among our youth, and the health effects it has been proven to have on them as young people.”
According to the Surgeon General’s Advisory on e-cigarette use, “Nicotine exposure during adolescence can impact learning, memory, and attention. In addition to nicotine, the aerosol that users inhale and exhale from e-cigarettes can potentially expose both themselves and bystanders to other harmful substances, including heavy metals, volatile organic compounds, and ultra fine particles that can be inhaled deeply into the lungs.”
Rockbridge County schools have been aware of this issue for several years, and have taken steps to combat it.
“We put in the vape detectors at the high school and the middle school a couple years ago and it made an immediate impact, certainly in catching kids,” Thompson told the Board. “It made an impact in slowing down some of it, certainly not stopping it. I think it made an impact, just not the impact we hoped it would have.”
More recently, the district has begun working on preventive measures, such as education.
“One of the things we did this year, we started with a module that we had all of our students, grades three through 12, take. We have an elementary module, a middle school module, and a high school module, obviously we want it to be age-appropriate,” Thompson explained.
“It wasn’t rocket science, in terms of making it extremely difficult, but it was educational for kids to have to sit down and have to go through the module.”
While vaping is more of an issue among older students, Thompson believes that starting education early is important.
“While most of these issues are at the high school, we certainly know that we have middle school students who do it. To our knowledge, we have elementary school students who do it, but at a much lower level; there are very few cases that we know of,” he said.
“But they’re aware — their parents do it, their older siblings do it — they’re aware of it. We’ve got to have conversations before they develop those unhealthy habits; we need to talk about what we can do to help them avoid that.”
These conversations will be happening in classrooms, within school curriculum, and in the library, which will soon have materials on vaping to check out.
“That’s the seed we want to plant in our youngest students, those healthy habits, and those thoughts that, ‘This isn’t a good thing, I need to make a better choice than this,’” said Thompson. “It’s worked before, whether it be with cigarettes or drugs; there’s no reason it can’t work here.”
Vaping will also be included in health education, through the schools’ partnership with Rockbridge Area Community Services.
“RACS will be coming into the classrooms of every fifthgrader, this year, to conduct four 40-minute class periods on healthy choices, and, again, why vaping is bad for you. We’ll have them come and do the same thing for all of our seventhgraders, but have five 40-minute sessions,” Thompson told the Board.
“We’re trying to hit kids at multiple times and in multiple ways with these ideas of, just because you see it in parking lots and downtown, doesn’t mean you have to do it. You can make different choices,” he said.
The division is also working on outreach to parents and families.
“We’ve updated all of our website to offer parents and community members tool kits, to offer resources for parents to educate themselves on ways to talk about their children about vaping,” said Thompson.
“That’s where we are right now, and I feel like it’s a lot, certainly a lot more than what we were doing last year at this time. We’re going to continue to have these conversations and find different ways to do this.”
THESE are among the anti-vaping brochures from Rockbridge Area Community Services that Rockbridge County Public Schools will be giving to students this school year.
