Now some of boarding schools are stopping punishning the smokers among their students
Kids buck no-smoking trendby Jennifer Buley, The Copenhagen Post, August 29, 2011---+---+---
As boarding school decides to let students light up, study shows zero progress in reducing teenage smokingWhile the number of adults who smoke is gradually dropping, the rate of teenage smoking is holding steady.
Since 2006, the number of 15-year-olds who smoke every day has remained at eleven percent for boys and ten percent for girls, according to a new study by the National Institute of Public Health (SIF). Three percent of all 13-year-olds smoke every day, the study found.
“We ought to be seeing a drop in the number of 15-year-old smokers, but it doesn’t surprise me that it’s not happening because there hasn’t been any particular effort to make it happen,” Pernille Due, head of research for the SIF, told Politiken newspaper. “The prices are still relatively low, and in the schools they talk about alcohol and drugs and only very rarely about smoking. More should be done to decrease the number of young smokers.”
At the beginning of 2008, the Danish Cancer Society presented the government and parliament with eleven recommendations for how to reduce the number of young smokers by half.
”We presented politicians with eleven proposals, but only one of them was carried out, and that was the one with the least documented effect,” Per Kim Nielsen, the Danish Cancer Society’s project manager for children, youth and smoking, said.
That recommendation was to raise the legal smoking age from 16 to 18 years.
In related news, the association of independent boarding schools, Efterskoleforeningen, reports that three out of every ten boarding schools in the country allow their 14-18 year old students to smoke – even though most of the students are under the legal smoking age.
One school, Rens Ungdomsskole in the Jutland town of Tønder, recently reversed its no smoking policy to allow students to smoke on school premises.
“The thrill of breaking a rule actually encourages young people to smoke,” Rens Ungdomsskole headmaster Kim Albrecht told public broadcaster DR. “Many students who were here at the school last year, when they weren’t allowed to smoke, and who came back again this year, say that it was a lot more fun [to smoke] when they had to hide behind the bushes, trying to evade teachers.”
While the school is now offering the students smoking rights and designated smoking areas, they are not allowed to give cigarettes to other students or even to loan a cigarette to another student who smokes. In addition, the boarding school offers smoking cessation classes.
The health minister, Bertel Haarder, confirmed that there is just a single employee at the National Board of Health working full-time on smoking prevention policies. The opposition Social Democrat health spokesperson, Sophie Hæstorp Andersen, proposed setting a goal to reduce youth smoking to five percent.
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We have warned parents of the students for years not to sign an agreement with a boarding school which have rules which are against the values of their teenager. Instead they should keep their child home. Next step is to fight for the presence of friday bars serving light alcohol like beers and wine as we do it in our high schools.
