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.
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.
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.