It was in physical education class when Laila Gutierrez swapped out self-harm for a new vice.
The freshman from Phoenix had long struggled with depression and would cut her arms to feel something. Anything. The first drag from a friend’s vape several years ago offered the shy teenager a new way to escape.
She quit cutting but got hooked on nicotine. Her sadness got harder to carry after her uncle died, and she felt she couldn’t turn to her grieving parents for comfort. Bumming fruity vapes at school became part of her routine.
“I would ask my friends who had them, ‘I’m going through a lot, can I use it?’” Gutierrez, now 18, told The 74. “Or ‘I failed my test and I feel like smoking would be better than cutting my wrists.’”
It worked until she got caught.
Like students across the country, Gutierrez got dragged into a nicotine-fueled war between vape manufacturers—including a company that leveraged online advertisements on the websites of Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network to hook kids on e-cigarettes—and educators, who’ve turned to digital surveillance tools and discipline to crack down on the youngest users. Gutierrez was suspended for a week after she was nabbed vaping in a crowded school bathroom during her lunch hour.
An in-depth investigation by The 74 reveals how nicotine-addicted teens, who often begin vaping under social pressure or, like Gutierrez, to cope with hardship, are routinely kicked out of school instead of receiving meaningful services that could steer them away from tobacco and help them break free of their vape pens.
Candid interviews with a dozen high schoolers and recent graduates from across the country reveal how vaping has become ubiquitous in schools. The battery-powered nicotine sticks are more than an addiction: They define students’ social status, friend groups, and coping strategies years before they’re 21 and legally old enough to buy them.
“At my school, vaping starts because you want to be part of the popular crowd, you want to get invited to parties, you want to feel like you’re a part of a community,” said Ayaan Moledina, a 16-year-old from Austin, Texas. “And you start doing those things because you’re pressured into doing it.” Moledina says he doesn’t vape and has been excluded socially as a result.
Public records obtained by The 74 from a vape-detector pilot program at Minneapolis Public Schools presents a unique window into the severity of the problem and of educators’ efforts to contain it. The main battlefield in the fight is the school bathroom. As they have for generations, teens take cover in the bathroom to socialize and smoke, but because vapes allow them to consume nicotine more discreetly than traditional cigarettes, district leaders are also embracing technological advancements to police them.
Purchasing records from schools across the country show that districts are spending millions to install sensors in student bathrooms—once considered a privacy no-go for electronic surveillance—to alert them to changes in air quality. The 74’s analysis of the data from Minneapolis Public Schools reveals that the vape detectors brought a spike in school discipline, but they also produced a near-endless stream of alerts that could overwhelm district administrators.
For University of Texas master’s student Cameron Samuels, who founded the youth-led group Students Engaged in Advancing Texas as a freshman in college, all this means is that schools are spending money on invasive tech that could go to mentorship programs “where teachers and educators can support students, meeting us where we’re at.” They argue that the detectors, often equipped with microphones, are no less intrusive than security cameras.
“Surveillance is only a diagnosis,” Samuels said of the decision to use sensors to counter student vaping. “It only recognizes symptoms of a failed system without actually solving them.”
Vaping Is “Everywhere Now”
In Minneapolis, the $100,000 pilot program placed sensors in the bathrooms of two high schools and two middle schools with high rates of reported vaping incidents in 2022. The result, The 74’s investigation reveals, was a marked increase in students being punished for vaping in the months that followed.
Across the four campuses, a student was disciplined for vaping every 3.1 school days on average in the two years before the devices were activated and inundated administrators with tens of thousands of alerts. In a nine-month period after they were deployed in September 2024, a student was disciplined for the same offense every 1.4 days.
The increase was particularly pronounced at Anwatin Middle School, where in the 2022-23 school year, there were 15 vape-related disciplinary incidents. During the 2024-25 school year, after the sensors were installed, disciplinary actions for vaping reached 67.
Across the four campuses, at least half of the vape-related disciplinary incidents occurred in school bathrooms. Nearly 81 percent led to suspensions. Just 7 percent led to a referral to an alcohol and drug abuse counselor, according to the discipline logs, and after the vape detectors were installed, the rate of treatment referrals declined compared to the average over the two years before.
While the number of alerts was far greater at the two high schools, it was the younger students at the two middle schools who were more likely to be removed from their classrooms.
The escalation in vape-related suspensions in Minneapolis comes as federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data show teen nicotine use dropping since a 2019 high that reflected e-cigarettes' growing hold on the market. In 2024, some 8.1 percent of middle and high school students reported using tobacco products within the last 30 days, according to the most recent results from the CDC’s National Youth Tobacco Survey. Nearly three-quarters of them reported vaping e-cigarettes.
Stanford Medicine pediatrician Bonnie Halpern-Felsher, who helped create a tobacco prevention toolkit and curriculum that’s used in schools across the country, has found higher youth vaping rates than the CDC figures. And a survey of educators’ perspectives released in September about student vaping reports the behavior is “everywhere now,” especially at “ground zero”: the bathrooms.
The survey was published by the Truth Initiative, a national nonprofit that is focused on preventing nicotine addiction among youth and young adults and opposes school discipline as a means of combating it. Some students were brazen—vaping openly in school hallways—while others hid e-cigarettes in bathroom fixtures, ceiling tiles and tampon dispensers, the survey found.
Educators who were polled voiced concern about students’ “distracting preoccupation” with vaping and how constant bathroom breaks interrupted learning, said Jennifer Kreslake, the senior vice president of Truth Initiative's Schroeder Institute.
“It also takes away from the teacher’s ability to do their jobs,” Kreslake said. “Their primary jobs are not monitoring vapes around campus, and it’s taking them away from what they’re in the school to do.”
In Lancaster, South Carolina, county health workers spent more than $150,000 on about 70 Triton-made vape sensors that are scheduled to go live at local schools next month. Officials said they chose the Triton sensors, in particular, because they go beyond vape detection to identify “aggression,” “keywords associated with vandalism,” and “loitering.”
School officials’ previous efforts with vape detection centered on student discipline, said Ashlie Harder, the prevention director at Counseling Services of Lancaster.
“The goal for them was punitive—they wanted to catch the students,” Harder said. “They wanted the students to get whatever the disciplinary action was. That was the plan.”
Harder, who had already been working with the district to stop schools from sending kids home for vaping, hopes to change that. Her office, which serves as the county’s commission for drug and alcohol abuse, secured the new, high-tech Triton sensors earlier this year with the goal for school officials to “leave it for us” to do in-school tobacco prevention programming based on the Stanford toolkit with young people caught vaping by the devices.
Lancaster County School District officials said they hope the sensors will prevent vaping on campus while also providing a new layer of bathroom security. School-based police officers will have access to the alerts in an effort to prevent fights and to stop students from camping out in the restrooms and skipping class.
Lonnie Plyler, the district’s director of safety and transportation, said nicotine use isn’t the full extent of the problem—students have also been bringing marijuana vapes to school.
“We hope that it will deter these people from actually bringing it into the schools and using it, knowing that we’re actually monitoring it and can see it,” Plyler said. The vape detectors help create a process, he said, where students are “being punished through the school and possibly law enforcement.”
Gutierrez, the student from Phoenix, was suspended in September 2024 after a school security guard caught her vaping in a bathroom stall. It’s also common for schools to station monitors outside bathrooms to sniff out vaping and for some restrooms to be locked altogether as a blanket deterrent.
Getting kicked out of school didn't make Gutierrez’s situation any easier. An online quiz she was required to take during those days depicted vaping as ruining her life, she said, offering no help for her depression and making her feel ashamed.
“When I went back to school, I felt the eyes of the security guards,” she said. “It made me feel like I was in a jail.”
7 Months, 45,000 Alerts
It was 2 pm, in late January, when Anwatin Middle School assistant principal Nate Lee logged a new disciplinary action against two of his 334 students.
As part of the pilot program, Anwatin was supplied last year with HALO vape detection sensors. The plastic, ceiling-mounted discs are sold by a subsidiary of the communications giant Motorola and are designed to notify administrators of vapor, smoke, and with certain microphone-equipped models, gunshots. Officials installed the devices in two boys’ and two girls’ bathrooms.
Once all 29 sensors across the two middle schools and two high schools went live in September 2024, administrators began receiving real-time alerts notifying them of suspected vaping, smoking—and evidence of students masking vape plumes with pungent aerosols like Axe Body Spray.
At Anwatin, administrators responded to vape sensor alerts with fervor, student disciplinary records show, often resulting in suspensions. In the January incident, a seventh and an eighth grader were suspended after “investigative efforts” found they were in the bathroom “at a time when the vape detector monitoring system alerted staff to illicit activity.”
“Students denied involvement,” disciplinary records note, “but were both found to be in the bathroom.”
The 74’s analysis of vape detection alerts suggest the sensors are accurate—or at least go off most when kids are likely to be in the building. Few alerts occurred outside normal school hours, according to the logs.
Over a seven-month period between September 2024 and April 2025, the HALO sensors went off more than 45,000 times across the four Minneapolis campuses. On any given school day, the data reveal, Minneapolis educators at the four schools received an average of 412 alerts—roughly one every minute. On their most active day, the sensors alerted school officials to vaping 755 times.
The sheer number of alerts raises the question of whether school officials can reasonably respond to them, and if not, whether they’re an effective way to stop students from vaping at school—or curb their habit in general.
Youth cigarette prevention efforts have existed in schools since the 1960s after a landmark Surgeon General report linked smoking to deleterious health consequences, including lung cancer and heart disease. Technological advancements in e-cigarettes were sold as healthier alternatives for adult cigarette smokers, but the vapes have been blamed for breeding a new generation of nicotine addicts. By the time the vape detectors emerged on the market, kids were already hooked.
Student interviews reveal the degree to which vaping culture has become fully ingrained in student life, with teens describing the allure of nicotine as so strong that addiction is nearly inevitable. For some teens who are sick of it, vaping has become a reason to avoid school bathrooms altogether.
“They do it at school, they do it in the bathrooms, they do it with their friends, and they think it’s cool, but they don’t understand the long-term impacts of it,” said Moledina, the Austin teen, who is the federal policy director for Students Engaged in Advancing Texas.
Over the summer, he and dozens of other students from across the country convened in a cafeteria at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, to discuss the privacy implications and potential harms of vape detection sensors and other digital surveillance tools increasingly employed in schools.
Even here, where adults warned teens about vape sensors’ intrusiveness, students offered varying perspectives about the factors that lead to teen vaping—and the best strategies to prevent it. Nathan Wanna, a 14-year-old freshman from St. Paul, said he wished the sensors were installed in the bathrooms at his school.
“I say it might be an invasion of privacy, but if it’s needed, it should be in there,” Wanna said. “I wouldn’t see my friends tempted by peer pressure or the pain they go through to start doing that.”
Student-Savvy Workarounds
The four Minneapolis pilot schools saw a surge in vape alerts just before noon, suggesting students used the lull during lunch break to get their fix. Vaping was by far the most common trigger, the HALO logs show, accounting for 74 percent of alerts. Smoking cigarettes accounted for another 25 percent. In just 87 incidents, the sensors were triggered by tetrahydrocannabinol, the mind-shifting compound in cannabis, which can be consumed by vaping or other delivery methods.
The high schools were also overrepresented in the vape logs, even after accounting for their larger student populations, a finding that correlates with a higher percentage of tobacco users among older teens compared to those in middle school. Nearly 93 percent of vape alerts were registered on the sensors at Camden and Roosevelt high schools while just 7 percent were logged at Anwatin and Andersen United middle schools. Yet the middle schools accounted for 53 percent of all disciplinary write-ups for vaping. The disparity in the alert-to-discipline ratio suggests that high school administrators may have gotten buried by the noise.
The 74 provided Minneapolis Public Schools with a list of key findings from its investigation but officials didn’t agree to an interview or provide a written statement. Plans for vape detection beyond the four-campus pilot program at the district are unclear. But No Tech Criminalization in Education, a national network of advocates and researchers that convened the student gathering in St. Paul this summer, has called on the district to give it up. When Minneapolis students are caught by the sensors, “they’re just told to go home,” said local activist Marika Pfefferkorn, a NOTICE Coalition founder.
“Teachers and administrators have said that with vaping and vape detection, that we’re treating some students as if it’s a mental health issue … and then for other students, it’s a behavior issue,” Pfefferkorn said.
The analysis accounts for a blackout period from early December 2024 through the end of January when the logs provided by Minneapolis Public Schools show zero sensor alerts. The data may have been excluded in error because the student disciplinary records provided to The 74 show some vape-related incidents during that same period, including several that cite the sensors.
While a single vaping session could trigger multiple alerts, records indicate such occurrences are rare. Fewer than 5 percent of alerts were within 10 seconds of another notification from the same device. Of the pings across the four schools, just over half occurred 60 seconds or more after another alert on the same device, meaning it’s likely the sensors were picking up separate vaping incidents.
IPVM, a surveillance industry research firm that runs a 12,000-square-foot testing facility in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, has conducted audits on the HALO sensors, alongside similar devices, for several years and found they’re generally effective at their intended purpose: detecting plumes of vapor.
But the sensors aren’t foolproof—they could be beaten by blowing the vapor into a bottle or a jacket sleeve—and there were other drawbacks, including alerts delayed by more than 20 seconds, the firm found. The detectors’ efficacy is highly dependent on where they’re installed, said Nikita Ermolaev, an IPVM senior research engineer.
In Minneapolis, the number of vape detections decreased over time, though it’s unclear if that’s because the sensors were a deterrent for students or if their placement was fine-tuned.
“How big is the school bathroom, how high are the ceilings?” Ermolaev said. “How savvy are the students when it comes to workarounds? Are there windows in the bathroom that you can blow vape to?”
After asking The 74 for a list of detailed questions, Motorola did not provide answers in writing or otherwise and did not respond to follow-up requests for comment.
In its marketing efforts to schools, Motorola has highlighted federal pandemic relief funds as a resource districts could use to finance the HALO sensors, each of which cost about $1,000. The company has also pointed to settlement money from lawsuits against e-cigarette maker Juul. In 2022, Juul reportedly agreed to pay $1.7 billion to settle more than 5,000 lawsuits, including by school districts. Many alleged it knowingly and unlawfully advertised tobacco to minors.
School systems identified by Motorola as using Juul settlement money to buy the sensors include those in Stockton, California, and Fairfax, Virginia, which received $3.2 million from the tobacco company.
Vape City
These days, Elijah Edminster works at Vape City, a chain with more than 250 locations in multiple states and ambitions to become “the #1 vape shop in the USA.”
But a few years before he started selling vapes at the shop north of Austin—Edminster said he’s required to ID all his customers and none are underage—he was a high schooler who got sent to an alternative school as punishment for vaping. It all happened after he took a hit his junior year in the school’s main bathroom.
“None of our bathrooms have doors or anything so, you know, it’s all pretty open,” said Edminster, now 21. He said he met up with a classmate in a stall to buy a THC vape pen, “tested out the little thing,” and got caught by school staff on his way out the door.
The school official “pulls us off to the side and starts questioning us, basically talking about how it was suspicious that we were in there,” said Edminster, who was 18 at the time. “And he was like, ‘Oh, I have this vape detector that goes off, yada yada, and it went off. So what does that mean?’”
Edminster said he confessed after school officials threatened to call the police. Under a new state law, he was assigned to an alternative program housed in an “inactive, old” elementary” school for a month.
Thirty days is a long time to be away from regular classes, and the impact of schools’ punitive vaping crackdown has been particularly pronounced in Texas. School districts in the state have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to deploy sensors across hundreds of campuses, district procurement records show. In 2023, Texas state leaders passed a law requiring that students, like Edminster, be placed in an alternative school if caught vaping on campus.
The number of kids removed from traditional classrooms after the law was enacted grew by thousands—so high that state lawmakers backtracked this spring and returned vape-related disciplinary decisions to local districts.
Andrew Hairston, the director of the Education Justice Project at the nonprofit Texas Appleseed, said the state’s two-year, anti-vaping enforcement effort has become “one of the most pressing things that we’re working on.”
“A lot of parents are reaching out to us—or young people—and telling us that their entry into the school-to-prison pipeline is fueled by vaping,” Hairston said. “It’s just a really unfortunate reality, especially for so many working-class Black and brown families across the state who are disproportionately impacted by punitive vaping policies.”
A year after his first offense, Edminster said school administrators used a detector to bust him again, this time for trying to mask a vape cloud with cologne. He was suspended for three days.
“I still smoke, I still vape, you know what I mean?” he said. “I’m trying to quit vaping, but ya, [getting suspended] didn’t really do too much. It definitely just made me try and stop at school — but not even that much.”
Students should not be suspended for vaping but instead made to attend tobacco cessation programs, said Halpern-Felsher, the pediatrics professor behind the widely used tobacco prevention toolkit and director of Stanford’s REACH Lab. And even if kids are sent home—where they're likely to vape more, she points out—they should still be offered help quitting in school.
Halpern-Felsher's own data suggests the CDC’s teen vaping numbers are an undercount, and based on her conversations with educators, she’s challenged the narrative that the country is “going in the right direction.”
She worries the vape detectors in school bathrooms could be tripped up by both false positives and negatives. While something as simple as hairspray could trigger an alarm, she said, delayed alerts could give school administrators bad information that could lead to disciplinary action against the wrong student.
Minnesota’s own state health department has cautioned against using discipline to stop youth vaping, as have two leading tobacco prevention organizations, The Truth Initiative and the American Lung Association. Last year, American Lung Association president and CEO Harold Wimmer called out vape detectors in particular.
“Students need additional education about the health risks and to be provided with resources to help them quit for good,” he said in a statement. “Teens should not be punished for being addicted to a product that was aggressively marketed to them on social media, through celebrities and with kid-friendly flavors.”
Garrison Parthemore observed the prevalence of vaping in his Pennsylvania high school and felt the bad habit was changing the lives of his peers for the worse. So he teamed up with his brother and a friend to do something about it.
“Every time we’d walk into the school bathroom we were met with a cloud of smoke,” Parthemore told The 74 in an interview. “We knew if there’s a problem at our school, it’s probably a problem everywhere.”
In 2020, the trio built a vape detector and entered their creation into a state STEM competition. The device came in third place and quickly found success after hitting the market in 2022. After undergoing a few upgrades, vape detectors became the flagship product of his company Triton Sensors, which claims it offers “the most accurate sensor to detect Vape, THC, Loitering, Crowding, Keywords, Aggression, Gunshots and More.” There are thousands of them in campus bathrooms across the country, including in the nation’s two largest school districts, New York City and Los Angeles.
But don’t call Triton Sensors “vape detectors”: Parthemore said the label is “one of my pet peeves, honestly.” They’re much more than that, he maintains. He called vape detection the company’s “low-hanging fruit,” as it pursues a more ambitious goal of promoting safety in public bathrooms and other private spaces where cameras are prohibited and authorities “have no idea of really what’s going on.”
He claimed Triton sensors allow school officials to know how many students are in the restrooms at any given time, even without a videofeed. With sensors that pick up 20 different environmental factors—from air quality to gunshots—Parthemore said they’re able to capture “about 90 percent of what a camera can.”
“I can tell you where they’re at in the room, I can tell you how long they’ve been there, so we can detect things like class cutting or overcrowding,” he said. A keyword detection feature allows the sensors to notify officials of an emergency. “If someone’s in trouble, they can yell ‘help me,’ or ‘stop it,’ or ‘emergency.’”
Equipping the sensors with cameras, he said, is outside the equation and that the devices don’t collect “any personally identifiable information,” so while they can zero in on how many students might be in a bathroom at any given time, they don’t attempt to pinpoint individual students.
Yet as manufacturers like Triton and HALO branch out beyond flagging fragrant vape plumes, they raise additional privacy concerns. A massive vulnerability in the latest Motorola-owned HALO sensors, which include the microphones designed to alert school staff to fights, school shootings, and “aggression,” was exposed in August.
At a conference in Las Vegas, hackers revealed how the devices suffered from a flaw that allowed them to hijack the HALO sensors’ microphones. Once that weakness was exploited, the duo were able to eavesdrop remotely and create fake alerts. Motorola responded almost immediately, notifying its customers it was rolling out updates after the sensors suffered “critical vulnerabilities” that allowed hackers to take control of the sensors “through brute-force attacks.”
It’s this creeping surveillance that gives some students pause, even those who told The 74 they otherwise support vape detectors in bathrooms. The possibility of unknown capabilities with the sensors is “very scary to me” said Moledina, the Austin teen, who worries about a future where bathrooms come with cameras.
“Just knowing that there is vape smoke in the bathroom doesn’t really help you because the administrators already know it’s happening, and just by knowing that it’s there isn't going to help them find out who is doing it,” he said. “So my concern is that, at the end of the day, we’re going to end up having cameras in bathrooms, which is definitely not what we want.”
Minneapolis educators have used surveillance cameras in conjunction with the sensors to identify students for vaping in the bathrooms, discipline logs show.
In February, for example, a Roosevelt High School senior was suspended for a day based on accusations they hit a weed vape in the bathroom. Officials reviewed footage from a surveillance camera outside the bathroom and determined the student was “entering and exiting the bathroom during the timeframe that the detector went off.” They were searched, and administrators found “a marijuana vape, an empty glass jar with a weed smell and a baggie with weed shake in it.”
That same month, educators referred a Camden High School student to a drug and alcohol counselor for “vaping in the single stall bathrooms.”
“After I reviewed the camera it does show [a] student leaving out that same stall bathroom,” campus officials reported.
Gutierrez, the 18-year-old from Arizona, said she quit vaping after she was suspended and now copes with depression through positive means like painting. What she didn’t do, however, was quit because she received help at school for the mental health challenges that led her to vape in the first place.
She stopped vaping while she was suspended, she said, because she was away from her friends and lacked access. She was frightened into further compliance, Gutierrez recalled, by the online lessons depicting vaping as a gross, gooey purple monster that would poison her relationships.
“Yes I stopped, but it wasn’t a good stop,” she said. “I didn’t get no support. I didn’t get no counseling. I stopped because I was scared.”
