When Aaliyah Iglesias was caught vaping at a Texas high school, she didn’t realize how much could be taken from her.
Suddenly, the rest of her high school experience was threatened: being student council president, her role as debate team captain and walking at graduation. Even her college scholarships were at risk. She was sent to the district’s alternative school for 30 days and told she could have faced criminal charges.
Like thousands of other students around the country, she was caught by surveillance equipment that schools have installed to crack down on electronic cigarettes, often without informing students.
When I was in high school in the 90s, the school had an area of the campus (outside) where kids could smoke. It was just an obvious thing to have at the time because half the student body smoked anyway.
France, in the 80/90 in high school we smoked outside, in community college we smoked in corridor, and in university we smoked inside classrooms and lecture theatre/hall, incredible :-(
That’s awful, I hope things are better now.
oh yes they are, kids almost go to prison for vaping now! A lot of things have changed.
You don’t need to go back that far even, I was smoking in my french high school in like 2004. But it was outside.
My wife and I went to Europe (from the US) in 2018 (Italy, and Spain) and one of the most shocking things of the whole trip was just how much people in Europe smoke. Like EVERYWHERE, while we were in Spain we got to see the final MotoGP race of the season, and it was like being taken back 25 years when smoking was allowed inside restaurants etc… Everyone around us was smoking and I really didn’t care for that!
The rest of our trip was absolutely amazing!
My school had this same thing. You could look out any window facing a certain direction between class, and you’d see a bunch of kids smoking.
Cigarettes were also like $1.25 back then. I hated winter because groups of kids would hotbox in someone’s car and come in smelling super strong, to the point that it was a bit much even for me, a more covert smoker. I can still smell that in my mind.
What’s funny is that the school decided to become a ‘tobacco free campus’ my senior year, so everyone just walked across the street where there was a city bus stop with a huge amount of room for people to stand and wait for a bus and smoked there instead. They basically moved the smoking area across the street.
And to a school back then, that would have probably been just fine. They were a “tobacco free campus” as planned XD
tbf, that’s exactly how freedom is supposed to work. We very specifically don’t want them to actually effectively force the student body to cease all tobacco activities. That’s draconian and should be unacceptable.
I agree, but I also think there has to be more work done on prevention and cessation of teen smoking and vaping. I started smoking when I was 14 and I didn’t quit until I was in my mid-20s. And I’m one of the lucky ones. I was also only able to quit because I worked in an office where literally every other person smoked, so I got plenty of it second-hand.
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It didn’t for me. At least not at first. That whole office was one huge cloud of smoke at all times (and not just cigarette smoke). I was practically chain smoking just by being there.
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Yeah, there was a lot more freedom back then. It felt pretty good as a teenager having so much independence. In my school, we could even leave campus during our open periods. At some point, schools started seeing things like that as a liability for them. Can’t help but think things really started to change after Columbine.
To bring that forward a generation, there was a period around 2013-2014 when vaping was brand new and schools hadn’t written any rules yet.
I remember kids vaping in class and some teachers being kinda okay with it, or at least turning a blind eye. Granted, only like 1 or 2 people in the school had vapes.
it was around 1986 when the ‘on campus’ smoking area was shut down for us. but that didn’t stop students or teachers from simply walking across the street. it didn’t stop the students who just lit-up in the basement either–right at their lockers, even.
My high school’s designated smoking area was a stuffy room in the basement with zero ventilation. I’m pretty sure they had to completely demo the walls, floors, and ceilings when they wanted to convert it into a classroom, and it probably still reeked for years.
There was a private school near my house that had something similar. They called it The Dungeon.