By: Salmeh Abdelkader
Laramie High School Administration discloses the efforts being made to increase safety precautions.
There have been efforts made to ensure the safety of the students and the Laramie community.
When school events occur, setting these boundaries and expectations for students is important.
Humphrey understands that young people will break rules and off campus is something he can’t control.
Although it becomes an issue when students are bringing things like narcotics onto school grounds, tackling this issue is important to keep students, staff, and community members safe.
“We can monitor and support while students are here, obviously when students leave campus there’s not much we can do beyond that, but we can’t have students partying at school events,” says Humphrey.
There have been several issues in the past years with narcotics, and although drinking can be a dominating one when it comes to school events; nicotine and tobacco use have increasingly become an issue with the younger generations.
Vape detectors have been put in the bathrooms to help set boundaries for students’ issues with vaping.
The vape detectors make a loud alarm sound, so teachers in the area will hear it, confront students in the bathroom, or even go over camera footage.
The school has been aware of nicotine usage in teens, but this year has been the only year where LHS has had vape detectors, “It’s been a pretty good deterrent, and what I mean by that is students are aware of the vape detectors, when the alarm sounds it’s pretty convenient for teachers because of how loud it is,” says Humphrey.
These methods are not going to be 100% efficient, but it has helped the number of students getting caught with nicotine products.
Humphrey recognizes that tobacco is an addictive substance, and for students that are multi-offenders they have put a course on nicotine addiction.
Students must complete this course while in suspension, “So to get back into school they have to complete that, this will hopefully increase kids’ awareness of the long-term effects of nicotine usage,” says Brady.
Students are becoming aware of precautions being taken by the administration.
Although it’s good for students to be aware, there’s a line on how much they know about the vape detectors.
To make sure the alarms are doing what they should, they have it set on a cycle, “It rotates throughout the building on a randomized schedule of when each one is active, they aren’t all active at the same time, and so they rotate throughout the bathrooms,” says Humphrey.
This way students won’t figure out the pattern, and they can still prevent vaping.