Girls vaping on the rise at local schools

A rising number of teenage girls are being suspended from Central Okanagan schools for vaping, trustees will hear Wednesday.

Seventeen per cent of all suspensions for girls and teens in the 2019-20 school year were for smoking, a category that includes vaping, district records show.

That was the third most common reason for suspensions, after bad behaviour (22%) and truancy (21%).

“The change that is evident in the data for 20192020 is the increased number of female students suspended for smoking,” reads a report to trustees.

“The increase in vaping amongst school-aged students is a concern for school districts in many areas across the country and is being monitored and addressed both provincially and federally through health authorities,” the report states.

The four most common reasons boys and male teens were suspended were bad behaviour (38%), fighting (17%), drug use (11%) and smoking (10%).

Records show “a notable decrease” in the total number of definite suspensions, those given for a specified number of days, to 945 in the last full school year from 1,161 in the 2018-19.

However, as the report notes, classes were suspended for all of April and May in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic and re-opened only on a limited basis in June.

Males accounted for three-quarters of all suspensions in the 2019-20 school year.

Over time, there’s been a decline in the number of students suspended from Kelowna-area schools. In 2003-04, 9% of students were suspended; that has fallen to just over 4%.

Reasons for the decline include such things as the “effectiveness of school-based mental health clinicians,” drug and alcohol intervention programs, and better counselling and emotional support programs, the report states.

The most suspensions last year were handed out at KLO Middle School (106), Kelowna Secondary School (103), Mount Boucherie Secondary (99), and Rutland Senior Secondary and Dr. Knox Middle School (both 84).

Glenrosa Middle School, which during the 2018-19 school year had more than twice as many student suspensions as other schools (217), saw its number of suspensions drop last year to 78.

In response to U.S. President Joe Biden’s decision to cancel the Keystone XL pipeline, economist Jim Stanford made an interesting statement. Stanford said: “it is now undeniable: fossil fuels will disappear from most uses in the foreseeable future. And fossilfuel industries will never again be an engine of economic growth and job creation in Canada.”

This is something that the climate movement and Indigenous land defenders in Canada have been saying for a long time but, now, we’re hearing it from economists too.

For some reason, however, the message still hasn’t reached Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and politicians like Alberta Premier Jason Kenney who remain convinced that there is a pathway toward building this project.

Instead of trying to save this doomed pipeline, maybe Canadian politicians should get to work in service of the workers they claim to support.

In the 2019 election, Trudeau promised to deliver a Just Transition Act that would support workers through the transition to a green energy economy with new jobs and retraining programs. It feels like this would be a good time to follow through on that promise.