Simpson schools plan to add e-cigarettes to tobacco-free policy

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Simpson County schools have proposed an amendment to its existing tobacco policy to ban e-cigarettes from school grounds, along with other tobacco products; the amendment awaits its final reading and passage Nov. 19 at the next board meeting, Lyndsey Gough reports for WBKO-TV in Bowling Green.

“E-cigs and the vapors, we don’t know what’s in there and it’s probably not anything that’s good for you. It’s certainly not modeling the healthy lifestyle we want to model for our students and it’s also potentially exposing them to a dangerous chemical so we felt that it was important to update our policy,” Joey Kilburn, the schools’ director of pupil personnel, told Gough.

The current tobacco policy, which was driven by students in 2011, does not allow students or employees to use any tobacco products on school property, both inside and out, during sporting events, inside board-owned vehicles, on the way to and from school, or during school-sponsored trips and activities.

But Kilburn told Gough that the problem with the current policy is that because all e-cigarettes don’t contain tobacco, they aren’t all covered in the policy.

“We had just seen some use around some of our events, in particular our athletic events, and really the purpose of the policy is, first of all, to model healthy habits for our students and second of all, to create a healthy environment,” Kilburn told WBKO.