Episode Details

Superintendent Godfrey:
Welcome to the Supercast. I'm your host, Superintendent Anthony Godfrey. This is the Jordan School District podcast designed to educate, inform, and hopefully entertain you. If it's something important to parents and students, we hope to feature it right here on the Supercast. And today, we are fortunate to have Stewart Hudnall with us. He's an Assistant Principal out at Herriman High School, and he's going to talk with us about a topic that has been hitting the news a lot lately and has really been taking off. That is the issue of vaping among teens. And he's brought quite an array of, I assume, confiscated materials here that he's going to talk us through. He's been giving presentations to parents to help them understand what to watch for and the impacts. And so, we're very glad to have you here.

Stewart:
Thank you. Happy to be here.

Superintendent Godfrey:
Tell us a little bit about yourself. Tell us about your journey and education so far.

Stewart:
I started at Riverton High School. I was a teacher there. I was a business teacher, business and marketing, taught digital media and graphic design, and some web design, financial. It loved it. My dad is an educator and he became an administrator. So I followed in his footsteps. And after a few years at Riverton, I made the jump to administrator and was placed at Herriman High School. This is the start of my third year.

Superintendent Godfrey:
Great. Well, it's great to have you tell us a little bit about yourself. How did you start to pursue more information about vaping?

Stewart:
Well, in the last couple of years, no pun intended, things have exploded with the vaping and the e-cigarettes and anything my students are doing. I'm interested in them, I like to connect with them. Unfortunately, in this regard, it's something illegal with vaping for the students. So every time I talked to some, I tried to learn a little bit more about what it was, what it meant, how it worked, what to look for, what they were seeing, what it smelled like, what it felt like. I tried to figure out everything I could from the students to determine what I could do to help them.

Superintendent Godfrey:
So tell us about what you learned from students about how they feel about vaping.

Stewart:
So for most of the kids, I actually had a few arguments with kids that said, "I wasn't smoking, I was vaping". There was a little bit of a disconnect for them, whether or not they were actually smoking or vaping. And we had that discussion. And in the end, in the eyes of the law, legally, it's the same thing. And so that discussion was had, but what I found out is, with most kids, almost without exception, when I peel back the layers, the reason why they were smoking is they're overwhelmed. They had anxiety, they were depressed. They had something that was going on in their life, oftentimes hard issues going on at home, but they didn't know how to cope with. And so it was a form of self-medicating. I had numerous students tell me, "Hudnall, when I see that smoke come out, it just relaxes me. It's an easy way for me to calm down. And sometimes there's nothing else out there that's going to calm me down as much as taking a hit".

Superintendent Godfrey:
So sometimes it's the process as much as the substance.

Stewart:
The scary thing is, they started because of the process. Nicotine is very addictive and the amount of nicotine varies so much, based on the juice, that they don't realize the amount of