Teachers report up to a dozen incidents of vaping on school grounds each week, according to school administration. The primary location of these reports is the school bathrooms.
“85% of our reports are directly coming out of the restrooms,” Principal Jeffreey DiLollo said.
Teachers on lavatory duty and school administration are working to alleviate this problem. According to DiLollo, teachers on lavatory duty report the time and place of the suspected vaping, the administration takes the investigation from there. “The vast majority of our approach has to do with the health and well-being of our students, solely. The rule is in place for you to make healthy decisions and be safe and healthy here in school,” DiLollo said.
The rule means that students will be caught, but the administration’s goal is to to help students understand the consequences of vaping rather than implement a different or stricter system to catch more students.
“I’m not looking, at this point, to do anything more than what we’re currently doing, which is to be responsive to faculty and staff who identify it administratively, so that we can have good conversations with students, close down the bathrooms, identify who’s there and hopefully get them some help, and if need be, consequence them accordingly,” DiLollo said.
Teachers have also reported vaping, particularly in the school bathrooms. Ms. Ashley Dermek, one of the school librarians, has walked by the 500s bathrooms and stated that it was obvious there was a student vaping. An anonymous lav duty teacher has also seen people vaping in the bathrooms. “Usually, there are multiple monitors, and they stand outside to see any smoke, but they can’t go inside and invade privacy,” the teacher said.
Dermek has also reported to have found vapes hidden all around the library, including stuffed in chairs, hidden in bookshelves, put on top of the tall stacks of nonfiction books, and underneath tables on the floor. She also pointed out that students are nowhere near legally allowed to purchase vapes. “It’s very addictive. It scares me a lot.” she said.
DiLollo said he cares about the students affected by vaping. “I’m concerned about the number of students who are using it. It’s larger than I would like it to be” he said.However, DiLollo underscored that the majority of students are not vaping. “If I thought it was an epidemic, I would look at it in ways that we would go about doing that,” he said.
