How Schools Can Help Prevent Vaping?

Schools are facing an epidemic. Over recent years, the number of youths vaping and using e-cigarette products has continued to rise. Vape and e-cigarette products make it easy for students to stealthily smoke while on school grounds.

Even with teachers helping to prevent use in classrooms, students can still go to bathrooms, locker rooms, or even classrooms. Because of the addictive quality of vape and e-cigarette products, schools are finding it hard to enforce no-vape policies.

There are still ways that schools can help combat the growing epidemic in youth vaping. Through education and enforced policies, they can encourage students to ditch the vape at school in hopes that ditching the habit will continue off of school grounds.

Facts on Vaping for Youth

To encourage youth to stop the spreading of vape use, teachers and other school administrators can help educate students on some of the harmful effects of vaping. For youth, vaping and the use of e-cigarette products can be especially harmful for brain development.

This can lead to losses of impulse motion control and even difficulty focusing on schoolwork or learning. The brain keeps developing until around age 25. Using nicotine products at a young age can be linked to issues with control attention, learning, mood, and impulse control.

According to the CDC, nicotine impacts the development of brain synapses in youth. Synapses connect neurons in your brain to neurons in your body, used for skills like learning, memory, and even the use of muscles.

Encourage Staff and Youth to Stop Vaping

One way to encourage youth to stop vaping in schools is through encouragement. Encourage your staff and students to create a more welcoming environment for everyone. Students may be less inclined to vape if they know that it creates a harmful environment for their friends or peers.

Some students may be uncomfortable with their peers or friends vaping in bathrooms and other areas where it is harder to enforce no-vape policies. With no-vape policies enforced, all students will feel comfortable in your school’s environment. Teachers and other school administrators can also help enforce no-vape policies.

Making sure that policies are in place for youth vaping helps create actionable steps that teachers can follow to ensure that students are not vaping. It can also help them understand what steps to take if they see a student vaping, or even suspect that a student is vaping.

Install Vape Detection in Schools

A vape detector installed in a school can detect vape particulates in the air. Some of the higher quality vape detectors on the market, such as the ones from Zeptive, can even distinguish THC from other vape particulates.

This helps schools in areas where THC and similar substances are illegal or regulated to handle those incidents differently than other youth vaping incidents. Vape detection can help deter students from vaping in more obscure areas of the school, where it is harder for teachers to enforce the no-vape policy.

Such areas include bathrooms, locker rooms, hallways, and stairwells. Because students are in school a majority of the week, the inability to vape in school may help stop the behavior elsewhere as well.