Taylor Schools nearly vape-free
Diligent, consistent, aggressive enforcement is key to student cooperation
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Taylor Schools Corp. isn’t unique. Like most if not all schools, vaping was rampant in the high school bathrooms, the hallways, the classrooms. It had become so ubiquitous that students and teachers had accepted it as normal, unpreventable behavior. That’s the trap schools fall into, despite rules, regulations, and desires to the contrary.
And Taylor’s solution to the problem isn’t unique, either. The school system simply buckled down and resolved to stop vaping. Period.
Vaping and drug use in schools should not be normal. Taylor High School Assistant Principal Brian Moon decided to spearhead an effort to change things. With the blessing and cooperation of the entire administration, Taylor decided to enforce its rules aggressively and consistently. It was no longer in deterrent mode. Taylor went for elimination.
“We do what a lot of other schools do,” said Moon. “We have vape sensors in our bathrooms. That's the main area we can‘t supervise as easily. A lot of schools do that. But the key to stopping vaping is diligence.
“With the sensors, our phones get alerts every time a sensor goes off in our school. It gives us the location, the time. And we drop everything and respond immediately. Every time.”
Moon said that the school year started with 80-150 incidents in a month. Now, that number has been reduced to just three. He isn’t so naïve as to think that all the kids simply stopped vaping, but he is confident that they are making a choice not to do it in school.
“There's going to be kids who are going to vape no matter what,” said Moon. “There's gonna be kids who will never do it. And then there's a group in the middle. We want to target that group in the middle and give them the opportunity to be away from vaping.
“We took a pretty firm stance on vaping and enforced our handbook policies. We were very transparent with the kids about that. It was tough at first. There were a lot of kids caught with devices. But we had a lot of kids caught one time and never again.”
Consistency in enforcement also played a huge role in the success of the school’s efforts. Every child is treated the same under the policy, no matter who they are, who their parents are, or how popular they may be. The straight-A student, the star athlete, the quiet kid, the class clown, the teacher’s kid. They are all treated the same.
“We did the front-end work,” said Moon. “It was messy. It was not fun. But the kids started talking. And once they saw that we were willing to put our foot down, the kids started helping us. We started getting emails from kids. ‘This kid in class keeps vaping. I'm tired of smelling it. Can you come search our class?’ The kids took control of the situation, and once that happened, things changed.
“The kids felt empowered. They felt safe. They felt they were being taken seriously and something’s going to be done about it. That was the turning point for us, but it took a lot of work, responding every time.”
The next step was adding an anonymous drop box for vaping devices. A student can drop off the device with no repercussions. No camera monitors the box. No student is entrapped for surrendering the device.
“You toss it in there. It's anonymous. It's gone,” said Moon. “You never get it back, but I don't have to suspend anybody. Nobody gets a ticket from the Kokomo Police Department. Everyone goes about their business, and we get drugs out of the school.”
The number of devices surrendered dropped as the vaping incidents did, Moon explained. After Christmas break, the number of incidents and surrendered devices neared zero. The violators quickly learned that neither the adults nor the students wanted vaping in the school.
There is no safe place to vape at Taylor. The bathrooms have sensors and alarms. The hallways are monitored. And the students are quick to enforce the rules themselves. There is no vape break at lunchtime. And no one wants to face the consequences of getting caught: suspensions, fines from local law enforcement, expulsions. Every consequence has been exercised in the process, Moon said, and the students see it.
Best of all, there are simply fewer students trying and using vaping products.
“We achieved our original goal to target that middle group of students who might have tried it,” said Moon. “They deserve to come to a school where they don't have to walk into a bathroom and be around it. We've achieved that.
“About 20-30 percent of kids use out of curiosity. If we have removed that element from our buildings, as much as possible, we're looking at 20-30 percent of our kids that had thought about doing it, but they aren’t. That's huge.”
Moon is grateful that Taylor resolved to address the vaping issue, but the level of effort it took to simply enforce a rule in the school handbook underscores the uphill battle every school administration faces when managing the equivalent of small towns with very limited resources.
“Our success is a reflection of what policy is enforced and not enforced,” said Moon. “We have a whole handbook full of policies. You have to pick and choose which to enforce heavily because you're only here eight hours a day, right?
“Vaping was a big enough problem that we chose to devote a lot of time to it. However, because we've dealt with our drug problem, we now have freed up time to focus on our truancy problem and our tardiness problem. You have to pick your battles that you want to take on. We did it. It has been great, and the kids appreciate it. That's what this is really about.”