Many students in our school seem to do some not-so-great things often. Whether it’s cheating on a math exam or vandalizing school property, every school has students who have done rebellious and harmful acts. However, you may have noticed another big problem that has suddenly become a huge outbreak in our school: vaping.
Vaping is incredibly popular among teenagers today. For those who don’t know exactly what vaping is, it is a form of smoking using a reusable and rechargeable nicotine stick called a vape.
Many students say that vaping is a form of stress relief for them. As we all know, school causes a lot of stress among young people. Students have found that vapes can lower their stress levels and can help them calm down during school hours.
However, using a vape constantly as a stress reliever is incredibly dangerous for your health. Vaping is extremely harmful, as inhaling the chemicals used to make the smokable substance can lead to many diseases and injuries, including popcorn lung, scarring in the lung branches, and even cancer. When students use these vapes constantly throughout the day, the risk of getting these illnesses increases drastically.
Another common reason why students vape is that vapes come in different colors and flavors. Students feel cool when they take a breath of their mango-flavored nicotine and show it off to their friends. Many students have multiple vapes of all different kinds of flavors, cotton candy, banana, strawberry, you get the idea, you name a flavor, they’ll have it in vape.
However, many students have been not only vaping but also vaping on school property. You may have experienced walking into a bathroom that smelled of smoke and watermelon, and a bunch of girls are all huddled in the handicapped stall vaping and gossiping.
Coming from a girl, it seems that every time I go to a bathroom there’s a faint smell of pineapple or cotton candy in the air.
New York State law prohibits any videography or security camera usage in public restrooms, including school restrooms, for privacy reasons. However, these students vaping in the school bathrooms are using this law as a way to violate school rules and get away with it.
Despite this, many students have been caught vaping before in bathrooms and have gotten detentions or even suspended from school. Northport High School has put teachers and security guards outside of bathrooms and ID scanners so that students’ bathroom usage can be tracked at any time. When you use the bathroom and your ID gets scanned, it records how long you’re in the bathroom, what bathroom you used, and what time you used the bathroom.
While it may be annoying to have to scan in and out to use the restroom, this rule is very helpful in preventing students from doing things that are against school rules in bathrooms, such as vaping. However, some students have somehow found ways to get past scanning their IDs when going to the bathrooms, and are still vaping in the restrooms. I cannot answer as to how, but I have my suspicions. One of the most common ways is to wait until there is no teacher outside, and another is by just skipping class completely and staying in the bathroom until the bell rings.
Many students have also been doing even worse drugs in the bathrooms as well. I have walked into the bathrooms many times and have smelled faint scents of marijuana before, which is even worse for students to do. It’s also illegal for children under 18 to buy marijuana.
Vaping is an awful thing for everyone, including students, to do for health issues, physically and mentally. Nicotine is a very addictive drug, and students seem to get addicted to their vapes. As said earlier, there are many health concerns and diseases that come only after a few years of vaping. It is also a disgusting and terrible thing to be doing in the first place, especially on school grounds, and in our restrooms.
