“It’s consumed us,” Alvin ISD Assistant Superintendent Rory Gesch said. “Administrators at the end of the year have desks full of vapes.”
With summer ending soon, school districts are preparing for the new year—and trying to figure out how to head off the growing trend of students using vape pens on their campuses.
Vaping, which for years was seen as an alternative to smoking traditional cigarettes, has had more teens and young adults pick up the habit in recent years, said Sandeep Gupta, a pulmonologist in the Greater Houston area.
“We don’t know the long-term effects of vaping,” Gupta said. “Lungs are very finicky and easy to damage. It doesn't have to be direct damage.”
While local school districts in some cases saw the number of students caught with vape pens peak prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, those numbers plummeted from 2020-22, according to data obtained by Community Impact.
However, since students have returned to traditional learning, those numbers have begun to rebound and in many cases have exceeded previous years, the data shows.
A growing problem
At Pearland ISD, the number of students disciplined for having a vape device increased ninefold from 2017 to 2019, according to district data. Those numbers dipped the next two years but in 2022 and 2023 were higher than before the pandemic.
Kelly Holt, executive director of high schools at Pearland ISD, said in an email it’s easy for students to hide vaping from adults. To help combat the issue, district officials plan to install 68 vape smoke detectors at high schools in the district.
“It seems more kids are vaping today than have been smoking in the past,” Holt said. “Students are missing class to vape in restrooms and other areas of campus.”
Dating back to 2017, Friendswood ISD saw its peak back in the 2018-19 school year at 93 incidents, according to data from the district. Those numbers declined once the pandemic started but have started to steadily increase again to 55 and 46 incidences over the past two years, respectively.
Officials at Friendswood ISD did not comment on the trends.
Alvin ISD doesn’t keep specific data for vaping, but officials have noticed a trend similar to what other districts are dealing with, Gesch said. At AISD, district officials have had to unclog toilets as students will try to flush pens to avoid getting caught.
However, because of the health challenges in recent years, such as with the pandemic, state and federal agencies have stopped prioritizing it as an issue, and, in some cases, interest from the community has waned, said Amanda McLauchlin, executive director with Bay Area Alliance for Youth and Families.
The Alliance aims at building community and preventing substance use in youth, according to their website. The group works with Clear Creek ISD but also has a partnership with Friendswood ISD.
“It’s almost an impossible fight—unless you can afford to put bathroom monitors in every bathroom, or take the doors off every bathroom,” McLauchlin said. “Vapes are tiny, easy to hide, and you can conceal the smoke. So there's just very few opportunities.”
Legislative efforts
Along with districts taking their own measures to catch those using vapes and punish them, the state has recently passed a bill—House Bill 114—that brings with it a litany of new requirements for schools to deal with the issue.
One requirement makes it mandatory for students caught with vapes to be placed in their respective district’s disciplinary alternative education program, also known as DAEP, rather than being sent to county programs, according to the bill.
Texas House Rep. Ed Thompson, R-Pearland, who authored the bill, said the idea was to give districts more flexibility in how they handle students caught with vape pens.
Districts in recent years have sent many students through Juvenile Justice Alternative Education Programs, which have become “overrun,” Thompson said. The new bill aimed at opening up where districts could send students.
“There needs to be some form of consequences that goes along with what kids do,” Thompson said. “We need to fund these [disciplinary] programs better.”
That approach though is just one side of the discipline needed to combat the problem, McLauchlin said. McLauchlin said she thinks programs that help with addiction are needed. It will also be one that takes the community to get involved as the issue often starts outside the school.
“We can't punish our way out of this. It’s an addiction,” McLauchlin said. “Adults use aids to help, and now we’re expecting a 16-year-old to quit [without help]. It's a vicious cycle.”
