November 15, 2019
By: Dwayne Page
Although the Board of Education has policy restrictions passed down from the state on smoking and vaping at school campuses enforcement is often a challenge especially during after school events.
To better educate the public and to discourage smoking, members of the Students Against Destructive Decisions (SADD Club) at DeKalb Middle School in conjunction with representatives of the DeKalb County Health Department and DeKalb Prevention Coalition are asking that they be allowed to post anti-smoking signs at all schools.
Megan Kinslow of the health department and SADD sponsor, addressed the Board of Education during Thursday night’s regular monthly meeting.
She began by reading a letter to the board on behalf of the SADD Club.
“As a DeKalb County Health educator I have had the opportunity to partner with the DeKalb Middle School’s SADD Club on tobacco related topics. We would like to ask for your consideration to help increase awareness of the current tobacco campus policy by increasing signage at all schools and other school properties. We hope to decrease the amount of tobacco litter on school grounds. This includes after school events such as sports and extracurricular club activities and anything where adults would be present on our campuses,” said Kinslow
“As a baseline for your discussion the SADD Club students recently picked up cigarette butts for one hour after school at the middle school and high school and collected 87 cigarettes in just that one hour. To evaluate the added signage and decreases in the amount of tobacco litter, we will replicate that activity at the end of the 2019-20 academic year and compare results,” she said.
“Your policy says signs will be posted throughout the district’s facilities to notify students, employees, and visitors but when we recently went out to all the schools helping to administer flu vaccines the only school we saw that had a sign posted was at DeKalb West School,” Kinslow continued.
“My idea is to let our SADD Club members create signs which the health department would purchase and make them specific for each school with the school mascots in the hope that there would be fewer cigarette butts to pick up next time”.
“It takes seven years for one of these butts to disintegrate and they are all over your school ground properties. We want to make sure our kids and others are not walking through smoke clouds, whether it be football games, baseball games, etc.”
“We also ask that you make sure your School Resource Officers are watching more closely and writing citations for violations. We checked and learned that the problem is mostly at the high school. Four citations have been written this year and about 20 to 25 were issued last year”.
Chairman Danny Parkerson and Director of Schools Patrick Cripps said the principals would have to be consulted before the board grants the SADD Club request.
In his monthly report on personnel, Director Cripps said those employed since last month are Samantha Antoniak, teacher at DeKalb Middle School to replace Justin Nokes and Natasha Tindle, school psychologist to replace Jennifer Shores.
Cody Randolph was granted a leave as requested and Jennifer Shores resigned.