Growing concerns over vaping brought Wallsburg parents to the Wasatch County School Board to request help to address usage among kids. Last Tuesday April 23, over a hundred citizens packed the Wallsburg Town Hall to discuss an increasing usage of vaping and juuling among children and teenagers in their community. This led to a follow up discussion at last night’s school board meeting as Chairman Mark Davis invited parents to present some of their concerns of behaviors and situations where children are being put a risk of exposure on buses, in bathrooms, even in classrooms with peer pressure to try and using vaping products. Chantelle Bowthorpe, one of the parents leading the movement said this:
“We gain our power to educate, educate parents on how big of a problem it is and I also think that we need to educate the kids on the severity of the problem. Good kids. Good kids who would never dream of tasting alcohol, smoking a cigarette, good kids are vaping because it’s becoming so socially acceptable.”
Trudy Brereton with the Wasatch County Health Department provides instruction on the harmful effects of nicotine, vaping and juuling to students to all 6th and 9th grade students, giving over 40 presentations a year to the schools. She also presented at the Issues Conference to a parents only session and showed statistics and data of the increase of use in Wasatch County.
During her presentation Brereton talked about the addictive substances in vaping and most specifically juuling:
“Because of the juul pod delivers the nicotine in more effectively and in a higher dose and so it’s really going to increase a person’s addiction to that.”
Officer Ken Purdy, has been working for years to combat drugs and specific nicotine use at the high school shared his insights on vaping and what parents can do to be more aware.
“First they need to ask their kids, because their kids know and their kids aren’t telling them. But it usually takes an incident that usually their child has been involved in and then they want to get involved.”
“We would not have a resource officer on every campus had it not been the parents that wanted that.
Chantelle spoke after the meeting about her experience and why she got involved and wants other parents to be more aware of vaping in our schools.
“It is a nicotine problem. But it’s a peer pressure problem. It is so socially acceptable that those kids who desire so deeply to be accepted. If my daughter goes into a restroom at the high school and they say, guess what, we’re not leaving until you try it, we’re not leaving until you try it. That’s a problem. That’s a problem to me. I realized we have to figure out a way to do this better so that our kids can be successful, even the ones that want to be good, but just want to be accepted.”
Wasatch School psychologist Dr. Ben Springer will be offering a follow up workshop to discuss vaping and what parents can do to help in the schools.
“These are individual acts it’s a choice that children are making and peer groups are making, and we’ve got to help them figure out how to report it when they see anything at all. So that’s community outreach, centralized reporting, and the last one is the most difficult, and this is reaching the child. This is actually reaching a child who has to make these decisions. I’m going to tell you as a developmental psychologist and rule of thumb that we go by, parental influence, teacher influence, you’ve already felt it if you’ve got a kid older than 10 years old because it starts to wane. The influence for peers after 10 years old starts growing incrementally.”
That workshop has been scheduled for Thursday, May 16 at 5 pm at Rocky Mountain Middle School where parents are invited to attend and speak up. You can find more information about the workshop at wasatch.edu.
