Recently, I attended a school board meeting where I was able to get up in front of these important decision makers and talk about a couple of the issues within my school. I was also able to speak with my principal. I come from a community that doesn’t really like to enact change. We’re pretty set in our ways. Just being able to get my voice out there and let them know there is a kid that’s trying to make a change was big. I might be the one person out of the entire town, but there’s at least one fighting for a healthy lifestyle.

The youth effort is happening because there is little to no adult effort, no societal or governmental support for this issue. Because if the people who are making these products are paying the people who are supposed to make the laws, how can we expect there to be actual regulations and how can we expect for our youth to not be exposed to these things? Obviously we are, so it kind of goes back to our efforts again, us as youth trying to fight that fight because nobody else will.

This is a picture of a dumpster with the words “Quitters can win” painted on the outside. There is also the helpline for helping quit tobacco painted below the words. I think adults do not comprehend how desperate youth are for help in many ways, like regulation for tobacco products and also resources for help. The message with this information has to be put on a dumpster.

It’s very hard for youth to quit because it’s all around them. I had an experience where I helped a friend quit and a helpline like this was helpful because it was a daily reminder that you can do it. A daily reminder, daily motivation, why you’re doing it. But when it’s all around you, you walk into the bathroom and your peers are vaping and they ask you if you want to hit. You’re just trying to hang out at a football game and kids are vaping. Quitting is a daily, hourly, by the minute struggle for youth who are addicted to tobacco products.

We can’t be there every minute of the day to encourage them so we need more resources, we need more programs like this, we need more programs we can implement in the schools and just improving on those programs because we can’t be there every day to help people quit. But something needs to be there every day so that we can help all these people who want to quit. We need better help than a dumpster advertisement.

Keeping the innocence with our younger siblings and the younger people that we know is important. A lot of kids are introduced to it at his age or younger because they have people in their lives that use tobacco products. When we presented to our elementary school for Texas Tobacco Free Kids Day, we had a lot of responses like “Oh yeah my dad vapes”, “My mom vapes”, or “My granddad smokes”. You’re getting exposed to it so early, those were the second-graders.

When my sister was in the sixth grade, I actually found a vape in her drawer when I was looking for something else. It was pink, it was small, it was cute, and it was easily hidden in the drawer. I was just looking for hair ties. I would never have expected to find a tobacco product in her room. You are 11 years old, you are young, can you really make decisions like that? Your brain isn’t able to process things as well as people who are older. The tobacco industry knows that and they target those who still need help making their decisions.

This rose right here was actually just in bloom, we got it to finally grow properly. The little pink things around it, those are hangers to keep the thing up. It’s a support for something that is still in its developmental stages to get it to the point where it can bloom. I feel like if I had all the resources necessary, I could be those hangers in my front yard, the support system to allow things that are maybe having trouble standing up for themselves or trying to get to the point where they want to be, I could be that support system for them to be able to get there.

The people of Say What! help you build presentations, get information, find out how to properly give it out to people our own age. A lot of the time the information you find is detailed reports of fancy scientific things and they help you figure out how to put it in a presentation where it can be explained easily to sixth graders. Being part of Say What! helps perfect your presentation skills because you may think you know how to present and then you come here and they’re like, “Ah, you should say this, you should do that.” That’s been really beneficial as well because then you don’t only use it for conferences or events with Say What!, but then when you go back home, you can implement those different skills and different strategies that they teach you at these events. They are a support system for us so we can go out and be support systems for others.

We need support from the schools, having the teachers that do want to help out, having them actually be empowered to vocalize that and to try to help create a safe environment for kids who share the same beliefs. More people need to be educated about what a vape could actually look like, what a vape is. Youths are able to point out vapes so quickly. Adults are often surprised like, "Whoa, how did you know that?" Adults are struggling in identifying a vape and not talking about addressing it. Things have changed, the shift from cigarettes to vapes. Parents and teachers are more knowledgeable about cigarettes. Cigarettes have a very distinct smell, they're very recognizable, but vapes, they're not as recognizable. Everybody knows what a traditional cigarette looks like but not everybody knows what all of these vapes look like. Most adults don't think it's as bad as it is because students have gotten so good at hiding vaping. They need to learn how it is for people who do vape, how common it is and how normalized it is, they'll be more aware of it.