Combating Vaping Epidemic - Halo Smart Sensor Profile

"You can’t put a camera in the bathroom but you can put this sensor. You don’t need these sensors everywhere else because you can monitor those areas with cameras."

...which makes it a great platform for introducing vaporware to the needy.

If I was the school administrator, I'd wait for the real world tests in actual school bathrooms before I sign up.

Also, in the CEO video he can't help but to dangle the current buzz term (AI) in his pitch.... as if the sensor needs to 'learn over time' what acceptable levels of various gasses are in school bathrooms - and then be able to alert on variances of same.

Serious question:  What does the sensor do if I blow a seriously large cloud of vapor from my vape device while simultaneously pressing the trigger on my 'can of air' that I use to blow crud off my keyboard?

The whole idea of alerting based on anomalous gas level readings in school bathrooms would be a joke if someone wasn't offering a product that claims to be able to do it.   

Sorry, I read it backwards :(

Instead of installing one of these in every bathroom, I'd think about rotating one or two - one in the third floor boy's room for a week, a second in the girl's locker room for a week, then move them to other floors, areas. Spot-checking for vaping.

A few kids get caught, the problem may be significantly reduced or eliminated without a having paying for one in every single restroom.

"My secondary point is that solutions that deter a certain activity are not 'solving' the root problem at all"

you only quoted the first part of my sentence - which was just the set-up for what you left off:

"- but instead imagine that they can provide value by purporting to deter the behavior."

While I may have worded that weakly, my point is that I don't think a vape detector in a school bathroom deters the behavior (vaping) at all...

No more than I think that (as in your example) surveillance cameras 'solve' crime.

They both simply try and protect against 'the bad thing' from happening in close proximity to itself - just by being there.

So, if the goal is simply to get kids not to vape in school bathrooms (epidemic?), I can think of a far easier way - that I suspect would probably be more effective.

A printed sign saying VAPE DETECTION SENSORS IN USE outside the bathroom entrance would 'move the bad thing somewhere else' - and cost maybe 52 cents.

You send a same sex staff member casually into the restroom and bust them based on smell. You don’t tip your hand about the sensor they know nothing about. 

John, based on your question, I reached back out to IPVideo Corp to see if they had encountered these issues with any of their pilot schools. They introduced me to an outside security consultant they work with on such matters. His name is Joe Pangaro from True Security Design. Joe is a former NJ Police LT and School Safety Director. Here's what he had to say on the process of actually following through on a vaping-detector alert.

Your questions will no doubt be the basis for some precedent-setting court cases in the near future. With the rising number of schools adding SRO's and class III officers (in NJ), the presence of law enforcement in the schools will change the environment. 

Until that happens we can look to current practices for guidance on what school personnel can do when a HALO alert comes in.  Generally speaking, school officials (Not police officers assigned to or working in the school) can take actions such as searching students, lockers, book bags and backpacks to uncover violations of school rules or district policy.

The concept is this: the school officials can do what they need to do to maintain the safety of the school and enforce school rules. Therefore, vaping or smoking must be specifically banned by school rule and be part of the school's official policies.

This is the main area to understand: If the school is looking for violations of state laws and the uncovering of crimes, any searches, and their permissibility are different than if they are looking for the violation of school rules. This may seem confusing but involves constitutional issues afforded to people subject to criminal prosecution. If that isn't confusing enough, if the school is searching to secure the school and enforce school rules as it is their right and responsibility and something criminal is discovered, such as drugs or weapons, then the evidence will be admissible in any criminal investigation that follows involving the police.  As long as the original search was done to uncover a violation of a school rule or policy then it will usually be OK.

Any time the police are involved it changes the situation drastically. The police are subject to the constitutional requirements for searches for criminal activity and may need search warrants to search students, bags, lockers etc. It is for this reason that we usually advise school officials to have a policy in place that specifically bans smoking and vaping as well as the investigative procedures that could be followed if smoking or vaping is suspected (E.G. searches). We also tell them that unless there is an immediate physical danger to the students such as a student with a weapon, they should conduct their investigation of school rules and policy and conduct any searches they need to gather that evidence before they call the police.  If the facts at hand indicate immediate danger then they should call the police immediately.            

If vaping and smoking in school is officially banned then a HALO alert indicating a violation of a school rule (not the violation of state or federal law) allows the principal or his/ her designee to take action to investigate and uncover violations of the school rules and recover evidence of those violations.  This means if a school official can indicate why he/ she believes student John Doe was the person violating the school rule then they can ask that student to empty their pockets, search a backpack etc.   If there are multiple students involved then proper investigation to narrow the scope of any searching is always the best practice and should be documented very carefully.

Your question about searching or patting down a student to find the vape pen in the student's underwear is going to be the area where the lawsuits will come and case law made. It is clear that a school administrator conducting an invasive search of a students person must be done with great care and only after proper training in accordance with state law.  

If the suspected vape pen is secured in a personal area of students clothing or body, then the students should be isolated and their parents should be called to participate and help locate the vape pen.

This entire area of policy is evolving as we speak. I am working with an expert on these topics as we speak and should have a sample policy we can distribute to schools who purchase the HALO system.   

I hope this helps you, please let me know if you have any other questions.   

My thought on the utility of these devices (which is definitely an open question - would I rather have our local middle school have, say, ten more cameras or ten of these chemical detection units? Or neither?) is different than this. 

To me, it's not about rushing in to arrest a kid for vaping in the bathrooms... as a parent, I'd like to know if my kid was doing it. I see it as: system detects vaping, camera clearly shows Sally, Sarah, and Stephanie leaving the bathroom moments after the detector goes off, school counselor lets me know (as Sally's mom) that it's possible or likely my kid was vaping, which I didn't know about. 

Much less about a criminal action or about searching, etc., "proving" which kid was vaping, but more about letting parents know if your kid may have a problem you didn't know about. I also think after these kinds of interventions happened, there'd be a lot less vaping at school - there would be a significant deterrent effect. Less about deterring kids already vaping (though I think that would happen, too), but more about reducing the likelihood of "on the fence" kids from picking it up by reducing exposure. 

Not sure how many posters have high school kids, but vaping has become *huge* in a very short time. It's likely not nearly as bad as smoking, but a large swath of the teenage population self-medicating with nicotine, THC, and worse is simply not a good thing.