The bad kids are the ones that smoke in the bathroom. It is a trope used across decades of teenage movies and television. These days it is kids vaping in the bathroom. Schools are tasked with confiscating all sorts of vaping instruments, and students are chased down if any items make it through. In the 90s I was a kid who smoked in the bathroom. Truthfully to be more accurate I was the friend who stood around while my friends smoked and maybe I would take a drag. It is not a gordian knot because it is not that complicated and it deserves very little overall energy.

As an educator, I am an outlier often from how my colleagues think. I do not want to spend time focused on student behavior and I sincerely doubt the efficacy of trying to enforce “consequences”. This is not to say that we can’t try to build better habits and guide students to making better decisions, I just don’t think we should devote so much discussion, energy, and psychological energy to it. I don’t want the adults in the school to prioritize and expend significant energy trying to solve a problem that has always existed.

Smoking and vaping are symptoms of much larger issues including: adolescent drive for a quick dopamine hit, the addiction part of the brain adapting quickly, the marketing of products to young people, and the developmental need to test boundaries. But similar to the broken windows theory of crime, addressing a small symptom does not have long term effectiveness. Instead it traps people into the crime and punishment cycle, which for young people of color and poor people can lead to a lifelong trap. What is accomplished by sending students home or suspending students for days as a punishment for vaping? Students are robbed of learning opportunities, with the deeper signal being that we care more about your behavior than we do your intelligence. It is this subconscious message and belief that poisons the well.

So much of what happens in schools is a gordian knot – prior schooling, trauma in life, generational trauma, resource allocation, teacher training, literacy strategies, access to broad health services, nutrition, etc. It can feel overwhelming, so something as clearly wrong and easy to address as kids smoking in the bathroom becomes the little battles we can win. Unfortunately if the cavalry and tools are deployed for each of those little battles, we are too depleted to execute a battle plan for the real war.