Students smoking off campus
Posted on Sunday, December 23, 2007
As students at one of the few high schools in the state that allows an open lunch, Fayetteville High School pupils are not confined to a cafeteria and designated areas of the campus during lunch time.
They can use the 46-minute lunch break to eat out at nearby restaurants, run errands or study.
Some students use it for another opportunity - a chance to walk off campus and take a cigarette break.
One of the popular areas to go smoke in the recent fall semester was on the west side of the campus' Garland Avenue border near the University of Arkansas nowdemolished Carlson Terrace apartment complex.
By simply crossing the street, the student can step off campus to smoke a cigarette.
"I like the open campus," said student Nina Burkhart, who was taking a smoke break at the site Monday afternoon.
Burkhart said she is 18. She said her mother told her when she went to FHS, the school had designated smoking areas, but they now have to go off campus.
Price said he did work years ago at schools that had designated smoking areas on campus, but times have changed and as much as any community, Fayetteville is against smoking. This was seen by the town's choice to adopt a smoke-free restaurant ordinance before the state passed a similar law.
"We don't seem to have a lot of smoke within the building," he said. "We've taken a pretty aggressive stance against smoking on campus."
The main reason the school has an open lunch is due to the cafeteria being undersized for the current population, Price noted.
There are probably more students who break school rules against using cell phones during the day than smoking, he said.
"Cell phones have almost become another appendage of young people today," Price noted. "I'm sure there are more students who possess cell phones than possess cigarettes."
Smoking and possessing tobacco on school grounds is against the rules, but Burkhart speculated that if the school had a closed campus, more students would smoke at school and risk getting in trouble.
"There'd be a lot more smoking in the bathrooms," she said.
"I stepped off campus every chance I got," former FHS student Dimitri Warren said.
While Burkhart is of legal age for smoking, some of the students who smoke off campus are underage. One 17-year-old student, who would only give his name as "Josh," said he smokes to relieve stress and hang out with friends. Also, the nicotine makes it hard to quit, he said.
"Some people think it's a way to fit in," Josh said.
Doug Huckabee, 18, said he started smoking because a friend offered him a cigarette.
Some of the students smoking on Monday said they still work hard at school. They just started smoking when they were younger and haven't been able to stop.
Josh said he still studies and makes it to his classes on time. Another student who was smoking at the site on Monday claimed he made "straight A's."
Josh said it isn't hard to find people willing to buy cigarettes for him.
One student, who said he was 17 and his name was Cody Bryant, said many people smoke as a way to fit in with friends. The lunch period is the only chance he has to smoke during the school day, and he said it helps relieve stress.
Some students start smoking because of the pressures they have to deal with at school, he suggested.
Justin Spann, a 2005 graduate of the district's former West Campus Technical Center, said he smoked his first cigarette when he was 6. He said he would leave that campus every day during the lunch hour to smoke.
Spann said a lot of students probably smoke to deal with stress, adding that he probably wouldn't have been able to function at school without a cigarette break.
FHS Resource Officer John Foster said they tried to crack down against smoking on campus at the beginning of the school year.
Foster said his main role as the resource officer is to oversee the high school campus, not nearby areas.
"They figured out they're not going to tolerate this on campus," Foster said.
Foster said with a closed campus, some of the established smokers would probably sneak around to smoke and might be truant more often. "I think they would still do it," he said. "Most of what we see is before school, during lunch and after school."
It might prevent some smoking if students who hang out with smokers during the lunch break didn't have the opportunity to go off campus. Some students begin smoking after they start hanging out with other teens who smoke, he noted. "A lot of kids do it because they think it's cool," Foster said.
The police don't have much legal recourse to crack down on the off-campus smoking except for the students who are minors, Spann noted. If they do crack down on a popular location, the students will find another place, he said.
"Once they leave, we lose our control and ability to monitor their behavior," FHS Principal Jim Price said.
Spann scoffed at the UA's plan to ban smoking entirely on campus, even outdoors, starting with the 2008-09 school year. Most students who smoke start when they are teens or younger, so by the time they get to college, the habit is too established, he said.
Josh said he had his first cigarette when he was 11.
Foster said a crackdown by the UA police at the Garland Avenue site next year might prompt the high school students who smoke to move elsewhere.
"It's not like it used to be where everybody smoked and it was accepted," Foster noted.
If a student is caught with tobacco on campus, Foster said he usually issues a warning for a first or second offense and then a citation for illegal possession of tobacco. Foster estimated that he issued six citations for the fall semester.
This included one student who had about six packs of cigarettes and was selling them to other pupils.
However, this is independent of punishments the principals might hand down, and Foster claims he does report all incidents to the principals.
"Any time we catch them (smoking ) on campus, we refer them to the principal," Foster said.
Possessing tobacco is listed as a Category II discipline infraction under Policy 5. 17 of the school district's official policy manual. The district divides offenses into four categories, with the higher numbers the most severe offenses.
According to the policy, available online at fayar. net, the first infraction at secondary schools for possessing tobacco is to be a day of Saturday School, followed by two days of Saturday School on the second infraction.
Saturday School is a detention program where students report to school for a half-day on a Saturday.
The penalty increases to three to five days of inschool suspension on the third offense and five to 10 days of in-school suspension on the fourth offense. A fifth offense can result in up to 10 days of out-of-school suspension.
Foster estimated that maybe 100 students are active smokers. The school's enrollment is about 1, 900 students.
In a November press release, the Arkansas Department of Health estimated that about 20. 4 percent of high school students in the state smoke. This was based on a youth tobacco use survey.
The study identified 8. 9 percent of high school students as frequent smokers, meaning they smoked on 20 or more of the 30 days preceding the survey.
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