Our Position: LT needs to take more action to prevent students from vaping in the school bathrooms.

It seems that every year vapes and drugs in general become more and more accessible to students. Many of those same students also feel the need to bring them into the school and ruin one of the few safe and private environments in the building: the bathroom. What does the school do? Close to nothing.

What those students choose to do in their own time and space is their choice, but when they bring it into a public, smoking-free building and risk the comfort and health of other students, then it should become more of a concern of the school’s. Nevertheless, it clearly hasn’t. So what, the school put up a couple of posters in front of the bathroom entrances. Did they really expect it to magically change everything? Because, news flash, it hasn’t.

In multiple cases, the school has completely given up and shut some bathrooms down, which is completely unfair for every other student who has to use the bathroom. When the bathrooms aren’t shut down, they’re most likely containing a student or two vaping—and that’s just the girls bathroom. The boys bathrooms are constantly swarmed by students bringing in all kinds of vapes, especially during passing periods. This has become so much of an issue that many students have resorted to never going to the bathroom during school hours, which is horrible for their health.

It is saddening that many don’t feel comfortable enough going to the bathroom here because the school doesn’t care enough to look for new methods of ridding the vaping problem. Even if students do attempt to brave the bathrooms while others are vaping or sometimes even smoking weed, they risk getting the same effects of the drug through the secondhand vape smoke. Just breathing it in gives them most of the same effects as if they were the ones vaping.

LT needs to take more initiative to find better and more efficient methods of reducing the amount of teens vaping in school bathrooms. Though some schools have resorted to limiting bathroom access, by no means will this truly discourage vaping. Our school needs to install vaping detectors in the bathrooms that will pick up on the contamination and alert somebody in real time, Digital Fly software developer Billy Schweigert told Fox News. Their device is one of many others that can detect gas and moisture in the air which will notify the school that vaping is occuring there. It does not take videos or record conversations so it is not an invasion of privacy, Scheweigert said.

LT needs to install this or any similar device to each bathroom in the school to truly enforce the school’s code of conduct and to bring comfort and safety back to school bathrooms.