Vaping is an issue for students worldwide. Kalani High School is no exception to this growing problem. As part of the State Leadership Conference competition in the category “Community Awareness” Kalani High School students Kacie Huang (11) and Gessica King (11) conducted a survey at Kalani and spoke to 240 6th graders at Kaimuki Middle School. 

Huang and King taught Ms. Kirio’s and Mr. Oyadamori’s health classes at KMS. They talked about vaping, shared facts and statistics, and played Kahoot, a trivia game, to see how much the students had learned. The winners got snacks and stickers with anti-vaping awareness designs from Mosher’s digital art class.

Before reaching out to their community, Huang and King first sought to understand teenage motivations for vaping. They felt their goal, to prevent students from trying it, required them to learn as much as they could about it.

They asked Teen Care Counselor Courtney Richards to pass out an elective survey to Kalani students who vape. From their survey, they found that 10 out of 11 students vape multiple times a day and eight out of 11 regret starting. A majority said they started vaping from stress, for fun, or from peer pressure.

Ms. Richards believes that because everyone has a different reason for vaping, it’s difficult to address the problem with a single solution.