Elf Bar and Esco Bar disposable vaping devices are displayed Monday, June 26 in Washington.
Andrew Harnik | Associated Press
Clark-Pleasant Police started a new diversion program they hope will help steer students away from vaping.
Vaping and tobacco use among middle and high school-age youth still persists, according to national studies last year by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration. In 2022, about one of every six high school students, or 16%, reported current use of a tobacco product.
In Clark-Pleasant schools, officials are trying to reduce the use of tobacco by students. As part of the solution, the Clark-Pleasant Police Department received approval from the school board this month to start a tobacco diversion program for students this school year.
During the last school year, Clark-Pleasant police had 77 tobacco-use calls and 84 calls in the 2021-2022 school year. Of those calls, 17 were deferred in 2022-23 and 25 in 2021-22.
Clark-Pleasant previously had an informal deferral program geared to help students who are found vaping or using tobacco products at school. This involved having students completing tasks such as writing papers or meeting with officers one-on-one. This program wasn’t structured, and police found repeat offenders tended to take advantage of it, Officer Talia Adkins said.
“We found they were taking advantage of those to get out of tickets,” she said. “What we really want is for kids to know what they’re putting in their bodies.”
Adkins led the initiative to start the tobacco diversion program, and put in the research to structure the classes. She presented the program to the school board on July 18.
As part of the program, parents of students found with a vaping device or tobacco on campus will receive a letter notifying them about the diversion option.
The diversion program allows students on a first offense to attend a roughly 45-minute long class about vaping and the danger of it for a first offense, rather than facing a costly citation and a blemish on their permanent record. The class fee is $75 per student, or a discounted $25 if a parent attends with their child.
This program is an alternate option to being prosecuted for the misdemeanor offense of underage possession of tobacco, which comes with a fee of approximately $145. The age to use tobacco products in Indiana and nationwide is 21 — a change made in recent years to help curb teen vaping.
A student can participate in the diversion program once per year and twice their entire school career. Further violations of tobacco use would be formally sent to the courts for prosecution.
The main goal is to use this program to educate students on what they’re putting into their bodies, and hopefully steer them away from vaping. No school police officer enjoys writing tickets for students in middle school and high school, Clark-Pleasant Police Chief Chad Pryce said.
“I don’t want students to ever feel like they’re marked,” Pryce said. “You get a ticket when you’re 14, 15 because of a bad decision, I don’t want that to follow anyone … this is a way to still hold them accountable, without necessarily having to write them a ticket.”
Adkins will lead the diversion classes, which the police department plans to hold once per month. The class will go over the dangers of smoking electronic cigarettes and tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, products. The class will include information from research on the different chemicals found in e-cigarettes, as well as data on the diseases and deaths linked to vaping. At the end, students will take a 10-question exam on the class topics.
Many teens and young people don’t realize what is in e-cigarettes and that they can easily get addicted to these products, Adkins and Pryce said.
“We think this will be a better, fresher start for our kids. Hopefully, we’ll see a reduction in the amount of vapes we find,” Adkins said.
Clark-Pleasant police officers constantly have to keep up to date with the different types of vaping devices popular among teens. Adkins and Pryce said they’ve seen everything from devices that look like pencils and flash drives to some that look like watches. When a student is found with a vaping device, police confiscate it and it’s destroyed.
Clark-Pleasant is following the lead of other school districts that already have tobacco diversion programs. These programs have largely been led by Franklin Township Schools in Indianapolis, which Clark-Pleasant modeled its program after, Adkins said.
She visited Franklin Township schools to observe its program in order to create one at Clark-Pleasant. Franklin Township has seen a decrease in tobacco violations since the start of its diversion program, Adkins said.
Greenfield-Central schools also started a tobacco diversion program last year, also modeled after Franklin Township, according to the Greenfield Daily Reporter. Center Grove schools is considering starting its own diversion program as well, but there are no definitive plans yet, spokesperson Stacy Conrad said.
The idea is the diversion program could fund itself with the fees, Pryce said. The money from the fees will also go back to the school for community police programs, which do include tobacco and drug awareness for both older and younger students.
Last year, Clark-Pleasant Police participated in 126 student programs in community policing, Adkins said. Those include programs like lunch with an SRO, K-9 demonstrations and mentor and mentee programs. These programs help build relationships with students starting from when they are in kindergarten, which can be beneficial as they get older, she said.
