Admins struggle to detect vaporizer use

Principal Robert Dodd said he’s disappointed students are high at school, though he hadn’t heard of dab pens. Cracking down on dab pen and e-cigarette use in school is difficult, he said.

“Back in the day when kids smoked cigarettes in schools, it was a totally different reality. It was an interruption. You could smell it,” Dodd said. “This is a harder thing to detect. That’s why it’s been harder for us to figure out what the trends are.”

The number of vaporizers security guards have confiscated this year is in the “single digits,” Dodd said. Dodd is considering having a device that could detect vapor installed in the school bathrooms, he said, but he wants input from MCPS officials, parents and staff before making any decisions.

If teachers believe a student is high in class, they can alert an administrator, counselor or parent directly, but doing so falls within a “gray area” because it’s hard to know definitively if a student is under the influence, he said. Penalties for possession and use of marijuana in school can result in an in-school suspension and referral to mentoring programs, according to the MCPS Code of Conduct. A student found selling drugs on school property can face long-term suspension or even possible expulsion. Administrators would also refer students to the county’s Screening and Assessment Services for Children and Adolescents.

“I am clearly concerned for those kids,” Dodd said. “If we knew it, we would be taking an approach that would include consequences and prevention for them to get help.”

But some administrators and security guards aren’t aware that students are high at school—let alone that dab pens vaporize cannabis concentrates. Last month, Amanda said a security guard told her that he had confiscated a student’s vape—an e-cigarette similar to a Juul—earlier that day. But the ‘vape’ he showed her was actually a dab pen, she said. When she pointed out the difference, he said he believed the two were the “same thing.”

“It kind of amazed me that they had no awareness there was a difference between a dab pen and a vape because they’re in two completely different categories,” Amanda said. “I really don’t think they know when students are high, and that’s why the students like to do it. They think it’s funny—kind of like a game—because the teachers don’t know. It’s this little secret.”