How Minnesota schools are trying to stop students from vaping in bathrooms

Lehla Gaulden tried to avoid using the bathroom at school last year. She felt uncomfortable encountering groups of teens crowded in the stalls, passing around a vape pen. This year, however, she's just accepted it as a part of being a high schooler.

"It's normalized — you go in the bathroom and just expect people to be vaping," said Gaulden, a junior at Southwest High in Minneapolis.

The habit vexes school administrators across Minnesota who are constantly trying to stop students from missing class to vape in bathrooms or locker rooms. About 14% of high school juniors and 6% of eighth graders across the state reported using e-cigarettes in the last 30 days, according to the 2022 Minnesota Student Survey. That percentage is down from previous years, but educators are worried that vaping both nicotine and THC products has continued to become socially acceptable among teens.

Last school year, Minneapolis Public Schools logged 252 incidents of vaping, resulting in 176 suspensions.

The district is soliciting bids to add vape detectors in hard-to-monitor areas — such as bathrooms — at five schools that had the highest rates of reported vaping incidents last year. The district also aims to add licensed drug and alcohol counselors to those schools: Washburn, Roosevelt and Henry high schools and Anwantin and Andersen middle schools.

"Students who are engaging in these behaviors are missing class time because they feel they need to vape," said Meghan Hickey, Minneapolis Public Schools' executive director of student support services. And a suspension means they miss even more instruction, she said.

The new drug and alcohol counselors, paid for by a $500,000 federal grant over three years, will try to shift the focus from discipline to intervention and support to break patterns of behavior and address addictions.

The detectors, which typically look like smoke alarms, are meant to deter students from vaping in bathrooms and locker rooms. Some Minneapolis schools have kept certain bathrooms locked as an extreme measure to try to prevent vaping — a move that received pushback from students worried about limiting bathroom access.

The Lake Superior School District, which includes Two Harbors High in northeast Minnesota, recently looked into adding vaping detection systems but worried that students would just go elsewhere to vape. So about a month ago, the district implemented a "smart pass" system that allows teachers and administrators to monitor hall passes granted to students. They can see how many times a student has requested one, when they left, where they were supposed to be headed and when they returned.

Compared to a traditional paper hall pass, the smart pass allows the administration to notice patterns. That can alert them to not only vaping issues but also to mental health issues or anxiety concerns if a student is consistently asking to see a counselor or frequently needing to leave a particular class, for example.

"It gives us an eye for early intervention," said Jay Belcastro, superintendent of Lake Superior Schools. "We're happy with the early results — a decrease in vaping being one of them."

Mustafa al'Absi, a professor in the University of Minnesota Medical School's Department of Family Medicine and Biobehavioral Health, said simply punishing children and teens for vaping doesn't address the larger problem. He encourages parents and school staff to focus on educating students about the potential health risks of vaping and offering support to help students quit.

"The magnitude of it is becoming really significant and really warrants a lot of attention," he said, adding that in addition to addictive nicotine, vapes contain substances that can harm the brain and organs.

The Minnesota Department of Health has also taken notice and launched a campaign in April to combat vaping. That effort, called "Hey Norm," encourages teens to call or text "Norm" at 1-833-HEY-NORM to get advice about how to start "the vape talk" with their peers.

Teens told Health Department staffers that they were concerned about their friends who vaped, but often didn't feel it was their place to intervene. The campaign's "dorky dad" character named Norm can be the intermediary to start that conversation.

The campaign is part of a larger statewide effort, which also includes a hotline and website called My Life, My Quit, and toolkits that schools can use to promote e-cigarette prevention and cessation.

"This really requires a more broad effort," said Parker Smith, who works in communications for the Department of Health's commercial tobacco prevention and cessation division. "It really takes all the people at all the different levels to do things in terms of getting youth not to use commercial tobacco products."

Robbinsdale Public Schools recently launched its own anti-vaping campaign, prompted by a September sewage backup at Armstrong High caused by students flushing vape pens down the toilet.

The campaign encouraged parents to talk to their student about two points: not flushing vape pens down a toilet and the risks of vaping, including "increases in learning difficulties," and a weakening of the immune system.

The district also encouraged students to reach out to their school counselor to discuss how to quit vaping.

"Families, please talk to your student about the risks associated with vaping," the district wrote to parents.

Gaulden, the Minneapolis student, said her peers turn to vaping — sometimes as soon as they get to school — because they are seeking a way to relieve stress and mental health issues, which have been acute since the pandemic.

"As teens, we have so many things in our life – jobs, home life, school and sports — and that can be very overwhelming," Gaulden said. "So we resort to good or bad habits ... We don't always know how to process the consequences of that choice, which is why we need support from our schools and our whole community."