Miami-Dade County Public Schools is installing vape detectors in every high school restroom because that’s where most e-cigarette use occurs on campus. NBC6’s Ari Odzer reports
Technology as a deterrent.
Miami-Dade County Public Schools is installing vape detectors in every high school restroom because that’s where most e-cigarette use occurs on campus.
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WATCH HERE“It’s not just a local issue, it’s a national problem,” said Vanessa Robles, a social worker at Miami Beach Senior High School.
Assistant principal Constantin Hernandez dumped a carton of about 20 vape pens on his desk, showing us one week’s haul of confiscated e-cigarettes, and he said they were seizing many times more vape pens before they installed the sensors in all the restrooms.
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One of the school’s resource officers showed us how the detectors first send an alert to his phone and to certain administrators, giving them the bathroom number, the time of the occurrence, and the percentage chance that someone was vaping. It also sends a graph of the chemical composition of the air in the bathroom.
“The oxygen levels change in the restroom,” Hernandez explained.
The device looks like a smoke detector, but it sniffs vaping fumes instead of traditional smoke, and the technology allows the bathrooms to stay open.
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“Kids are actually a lot happier with these vape detectors because previously, before we had them, the bathrooms would be closed a lot of the times because they were trying to prevent it,” said Melanie Toledo, a sophomore.
The school district has designed an anti-vaping campaign to educate students and parents.
“So we’re letting the students know that we do have vaping sensors in the schools but also letting them know that we do have resources to teach them and educate them about the dangers of vaping,” Robles said.
Vaping can lead to serious respiratory and cardiovascular issues.
“We know that kids are vaping, but the fact that we don’t have sensors, we don’t know to what extent they are, so we hope that this will be a deterrent,” said Guillermo Munoz, the district’s operation director, referring to the lack of data before the sensors were installed.
Miami Beach Senior High was one of the pilot schools in the project, so now that the detectors there have been online for a couple of months, they’re noticing that vaping in the restrooms has dropped dramatically. Students are smart enough to avoid detection.
“It’s a good idea but they should make it a little bit better because some students have found a way to beat the system,” said sophomore Juan Bajarnao.
Juan told us he has seen classmates inhaling but not exhaling from their vape pens until they leave the restroom, trying to fool the detectors.
Administrators, however, say they’ve seen a significant decrease in e-cigarette use at school since the sensors have been installed.
