Students at Poplar Bluff junior high and high school will have new policies around vaping in the new semester.
The R-I school board discussed the new policy at its monthly meeting in December. The conversation started a month earlier when Dr. Scott Dill, superintendent, brought up concerns voiced by Gov. Mike Parson about the issue.
Parson signed an executive order, which directs the departments of Health and Senior Services, Elementary and Secondary Education and Public Safety to develop a statewide campaign to educate, warn and deter the use of the products by Missouri youth.
Dill said the district’s new policy about vape products and use will classify it differently from tobacco use. It is currently classified with tobacco use.
The new policy includes new disciplinary codes for vape possession, distribution, use and paraphernalia.
“Parallel codes to what we have for tobacco now,” he said.
This change, Dill said, will likely cause the district to have fewer disciplinary issues in connection to tobacco because they’ll now be under this new classification.
“The balance of the incidents that we’re coding as tobacco now are really vape,” he said. “There are still some cigarette ... but overall those codes are being used for vape incidents.”
In addition, Dill said he expects DESE to start asking for data about instances of vape at districts across the state. It will also allow the district itself to have more data to deal with when considering how widespread the issue is.
“Given the very public nature of the conversation on this, all the way up to the office of the governor, I have a sneaking suspicion that (DESE) is going to begin asking us to track the data on this,” he said. “It’s easier to do so if we have a separate code already.”
Teachers and other members of the faculty at the district have and will continue to receive education about vaping in order to better identify cases of vape use on campus and how to deal with it.
In November, Dill said the district is looking into options for detection methods to install in areas such as bathrooms where the products are more likely to be used without detection.
Cameras cannot be placed in bathrooms, he said, but between the detectors and cameras outside of these areas, they could help to identify if a student is using vape products. These detectors can be expensive, but board members agreed to the idea of investigating whether they would be beneficial in the long run.