By Rhys Baker

Clay Center Community Middle School Y-LINK club met at the beginning of the school year to discuss prevention in their school. The mix of 7th and 8th graders decided that the top three prevention topics they would like to see talked about among their teachers and peers included bullying, vaping, and suicide. C-C-C-M-S Counselor Nick Brummet’s curriculum in the classroom contains bullying and suicide prevention. That left the topic of vaping. The group is student-led, so Brummet asked Y-LINK members an important question, “How do we get students to listen to this information? We would do 9th hours in the past, but they’d be activity-based. I felt like we were just babysitting students and doing different activities, but we weren’t focusing on prevention education. Their idea was to hold small meetings during lunchtime, during which we could entice students to attend by giving out prizes. So that’s kinda how it came about.”

The first Lunch and Learn discussed the short-term effects of vaping, such as dizziness, headaches, sore throat, and nausea. Brummet also shared research geared toward middle schoolers, “For example, right now, 25% of teens who try vaping get addicted in the 1st month. And so we talked about how vaping related to cigarettes, that there’s usually more nicotine in a vape than there is in a packet of cigarettes, and how students can get addicted quicker than if they were just smoking regular cigarettes. How the vaping companies are advertising and how they’re trying to get you to buy vapes based on, like, the different flavors. So they’re enticing students at the middle school level.”

Brummet also reminded attendees that middle school students experience one of the most significant developmental stages in their lives and how vaping will affect their brains. The next Lunch and Learn session will concentrate on the ingredients in vapes and how they affect students’ development.