Vape Detectors for Schools – The Essential Guide to Environmental Sensors for Student Safety 

Vaping in schools presents a major problem for faculty and security to monitor. To ensure that school policies are being enforced, faculty need to equip themselves with the necessary methods to identify when and where students are vaping or using other nicotine or tobacco products on campus. It’s not an easy battle, as students who want to continue their nicotine habit are finding more secretive methods to do so. Because of this, security technology that can help battle vaping is vital. 

Below, we’ll cover how vape detectors and environmental sensors can alleviate the issues many schools are faced with and give them a smart solution that ensures student safety on campus. 

Vaping Negatively Impacts Educational Institutions 

A study conducted by the University of Toronto analyzed the social influences, self-esteem, and stress levels of highschoolers who vaped consistently against those who didn’t. While self-esteem had no noticeable differences between the groups, vaping due to high amounts of stress was one of the primary factors for many students. Right behind that was the influence from their fellow peers. 

The implications of this study highlight the impact vaping can have, not only on the individual affected but the school as a whole. Fighting peer pressure and high stress levels caused by nicotine addiction starts with creating a safe educational environment free of vapes or other tobacco products. To accomplish this goal, schools need to find the right security solutions to limit any vaping on campus. 

How Vape Detectors Improve Student Safety 

Vape detectors (or environmental sensors) provide a way to enforce school policies on vaping by measuring the air quality near the sensor itself, sending out alerts if vape, THC, nicotine, or smoke is in the air. 

One of the most notable benefits of vape detectors is that they can help protect students from vaping without violating any expected privacy in the school. The most common way many students vape is in bathrooms, an area where no security cameras are legally allowed. In place of that, having a sensor placed inside the restroom itself to ensure that no vaping is occurring can help mitigate vaping in those sections of the school. 

Vape detectors can be placed in other areas of the school that may have security blind spots, as well. Stair wells and parking lots can be difficult to monitor by surveillance video alone. When paired with a vape detector, vape, smoke, or THC can quickly be identified and dealt with accordingly. 

The Benefits of Environmental Sensors Beyond Vaping 

While vape detection is a priority for many educational institutions, environmental sensors offer a way to defend other sectors of a school. 

Sound abnormalities such as gunshots or shouting can set off alerts for an environmental sensor, as well as spoken keywords (such as “help”), or any tampering with the sensor itself. These alerts create a more complete, proactive security network within your school by having audio sensors placed throughout to identify critical events that may be taking place. 

Environmental sensors can also track:

• Humidity 
• Temperature 
• Air quality 

This kind of data can be extremely useful in the case of any gas leaks or other abnormal external factors that may suddenly affect your school’s campus or HVAC system. For kindergarten students, being able to reliably monitor and receive alerts on humidity and temperature levels can help your teachers and other faculty members ensure a safe environment for children to learn in. 

Integrate Vape Detectors with Cloud Security for School-Wide Safety 

Cloud security provides video verification of events tied to sensors, including vape detectors and environmental sensors, to create a complete security solution for the needs of today and tomorrow. 

Vape detection solutions accurately monitor vape, THC, nicotine, or smoke in the air, and other abnormal compounds. A complete vape multi-sensor also tracks sound detection, such as gunshots and shouting in areas a camera cannot be placed. 

When paired with OpenEye Web Services (OWS), vape detection devices transmit events from local devices via the cloud. Integration with OWS takes environmental events from sensors such as HALO and Triton and transmits them to OpenEye’s powerful Alerts engine to leverage push alerts and searchable event history. These events, along with the correlating footage, can be shared quickly via email through our easy-to-use platform. 

If you’d like to learn more about how OpenEye Web Services works with educational institutions to ensure the safety and well-being of students and faculty, book a demo with us now.