I think by now most of us have had this experience. It’s in between the first and second block, and you REALLY have to go. So you walk into the bathroom… and you are blasted with either the scent of weed or vape clouds.

When I asked people how they felt about the apparent increase in vaping during school there was a main general consensus; vaping levels have increased, and that people really need to stop stinking up the bathrooms, to quote one student “When I walk into the bathroom and it smells like that ‘zaza’ I shed a single tear”.

When seeing why this is a problem we had to address why people even vape in the first place, there were a range of answers from students varying from “because they want to act better than they are”,  “because they are destroying their lives with an addiction”, on the opposite side though to this we got a response of  “it’s not my problem, its other peoples”. 

 Many students voiced the opinion that many people vaped in the bathrooms simply because they would not get caught, either because there are no cameras nor enough resources to check the bathrooms consistently.

This however brings me to my next question, how would they recommend that Administration fix this problem? Answers here were pretty standard, have teachers check the bathrooms every set amount of time, get vape detectors, air fresheners, one suggestion was as extreme as removing the doors of the bathroom to the hallway.

As side comments, a few people remarked that they felt the girls’ bathrooms were worse because “they get together to mooch off of one person”. While others felt that “the freshmen are the problem because they don’t know how not to get caught”.

This topic is pretty straightforward with an easy general consensus, the amount of people just saying that vaping in the bathrooms is annoying is overwhelming. “You should be able to wait 6 hours to not do it at school” is probably a sentiment many of us all feel.

We can all agree that despite the attempts made by administration to remedy this issue “at this point it is comical because the effort to stop the problem has decreased and the kids are kinda just making their own rules and doing whatever they want” is a sentiment students feel.

Administration may be trying to solve the problems, but their attempts do so have little to no impact on the issue and the students see that. So for now it seems until we find a solid solution we will continue to have “watermelon clouds of lies hit us in the face”.