Pilot program to educate Maui County youth about vaping

Youth vaping continues to be on the rise in Maui County. According to the Hawai‘i State Department of Health’s 2019 Youth Risk Behavior Survey, 36.4 percent of high school students currently use e-cigarettes in Maui County, compared to 32.3 percent in 2017. Similarly, there also continues to be a trend for middle schoolers’ increased use of e-cigarettes. With the alarming increase of youth experimenting and using e-cigarettes, it has been the Maui, Molokai, and Lāna‘i Coalition for Tobacco-Free Hawaii’s priority to push for more prevention education on vaping at schools all over Maui County.

 Prior to the schools shutting down in March of 2020, schools on Maui County were requesting vaping prevention presentations from the Maui, Molokai, and Lāna‘i Coalition for Tobacco-free Hawai‘i Coordinator on a regular basis. Seeing the high demand for direct services, the Coalition Coordinator moved towards a program called “training the trainers.” One of the goals in starting this program was so the Coalition Coordinator could spend more time advancing policies, and growing grassroots efforts, building the capacity to have others trained to provide prevention education regarding vaping for their staff and students. In April of 2019, the Department of Health also offered a “training the trainers” initiative using the Stanford Tobacco Prevention Toolkit. The program was starting to take off as community educators and administrators within the Department of Education were now able to become trained in the Stanford Tobacco Prevention Toolkit, and schools would have their own on-site staff to provide vaping prevention education. Unfortunately, not all the schools were able to actively participate in those “training the trainer” sessions and pandemic shutdowns prevented community members from providing presentations to students.

 The big question now is when will the Coalition Coordinator or other community organizers be allowed back into the schools to continue prevention education on vaping? Janel Brenson, an Advanced Practice Registered Nurse for the Baldwin-Kekaulike-Maui Complex, shared with the Coalition Coordinator that having a readily available trainer to educate students about vaping has been problematic at all the schools in Maui County. She further explained that there has been apprehension about allowing providers back into schools since March 2020 because of DOE regulations around the pandemic. With this problem at hand, she feels that she has had to get creative with how she can get the message across to students about the harmful effects of vaping. Janel feels that students do better in listening to their older peers and she and her staff are piloting a program at Kalama Intermediate that will be called, “Peer to Peer Training.” At the moment she has four students in the 7th grade that are willing to teach their 6th grade peers, and the plan from there is to recruit some 8th graders to then teach the 7th graders. The hope for the program is that if a youth hears how unhealthy vaping is they will retain the information a lot longer than when it comes from an adult educator. The pilot program has started to take shape this school year and the hope is that if it goes well, it could be something that can be expanded to other schools in the Baldwin-Kekaulike-Maui Complex. For more information on the Maui, Molokai, and Lāna‘i Coalition for Tobacco-free Hawai‘i, contact Mary Leyva at mary@hiphi.org.