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It’s no secret that many young people, particularly high school students, have a penchant for rebellion.
While drugs and alcohol remain primary concerns, more and more teenagers seem to have a new vice that they can’t seem to put down: vaping.
“Although the prevalence of current nicotine vaping declined during 2020 to 2024, the youth vaping population may have hardened over this period, evidenced by increasing daily use, more unsuccessful quit attempts and shifting demographic profiles,” according to an article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association Network last November.
A National Center for Health Statistics data report from January 2025 also noted that while electronic cigarette use had declined among younger demographics in recent years, analysis shows how “use has increased among adults, particularly young adults”.
“As 1 in 10 adults ages 18–20 and about 1 in 6 adults ages 21–24 used electronic cigarettes in 2023, continued monitoring of use, particularly among young adults, is needed,” the NCHS data report stated.
Even though it might not seem as prevalent in the Tri-Valley, there are still a number of high school students who not only are addicted to vaping, but actively use them at school — particularly inside the bathrooms.
“When I’m walking to class and I pass by a bathroom, I do see some people who are vaping,” Saarthak Yadav, a junior at Amador Valley High School, told the Pleasanton Weekly.
Sophia Sucato)
According to an email exchange among Amador leadership in October 2024, school administrators were updated on the fact that coordinator of operations, Dwight Pratt, had finished installing air quality monitoring systems in the bathrooms that are “most commonly used as vaping hangouts”.
“These will send live alerts to the phones of the admin and campus supervisors; Dwight was going to get a demonstration after the meeting yesterday. He’s hoping that will cut down on the vaping,” read the email — which was among the trove of documents obtained by the Weekly in its investigation into former principal Jonathan Fey.
In a statement to the Weekly, the Pleasanton Unified School District confirmed that 44 documented cases of vaping — including nicotine or marijuana — have been recorded in the district’s student discipline records so far in the 2025-26 school year. During the 2024-25 school year, that number was 41, and the previous year it was 30 cases.
“These figures reflect incidents recorded in formal discipline records and do not include cases where vaping was suspected but could not be confirmed,” the district stated.
Regarding those numbers, Yadav said that while he wants to believe the overall number of students vaping is low, he also thinks it might be higher at both of Pleasanton’s comprehensive high schools simply because not every student who vapes is getting caught.
“The drug and vape problem in both schools is still quite prevalent,” Yadav said.
Gargi Kanetkar, another junior at Amador, said she’s known about students vaping ever since she attended Pleasanton Middle School and heard about kids as young as seventh grade who were vaping.
She said she learned about these cases when she would talk to those seventh grade classes as part of a presentation for California Tobacco-Use Prevention Education (TUPE) — a state-funded program that supports school initiatives that advocate for the prevention of all tobacco use among students.
Kanetkar, who has been a member of the program since eighth grade, said when she graduated from Pleasanton Middle School and started attending Amador, she didn’t expect the vaping and smoking problem to be as bad.
But she quickly learned it was much worse.
“When I was a freshman, I went to the bathroom once and while I was inside the stalls this girl asked me if I vaped,” she said, adding that she declined and quickly left the restroom following the conversation.
Kanetkar said a big difference between middle and high school was that in middle school, she had only ever heard about students vaping, whereas in high school she actively saw students going as far as walking around with vapes in their hands.
Students hitting their vapes isn’t just a problem happening in Pleasanton.
“It’s been kind of crazy to witness,” Arshia Sharda, a sophomore at Livermore’s Granada High School, told the Weekly.
Much like other peers, Sharda said vaping has been a big issue at the bathrooms at her school. She sometimes feels uncomfortable when she walks inside a restroom and sees kids grouping together in the stalls so they can hit their vapes.
“It’s like, I’m going to the bathroom to use the bathroom, but at the same time I feel out of place because the majority of people at the bathroom are doing things they’re not supposed to be doing,” Sharda said.
While she did note that teachers and other staff have been working hard to try and crack down on students vaping in the bathrooms at her school, Sharda said it doesn’t seem to be helping, especially when there are students who are genuinely addicted.
She said she has seen certain students who seem to be more addicted than others because there are a few who go as far as hitting their vape in class so they can satisfy that craving.
“They take hits through the sleeve of their sweater or jacket … in class,” she said. “You can see people bent over and take a hit off their vape.”
According to Michelle Dawson, director of communications and engagement for the Livermore Valley Joint Unified School District, Livermore’s total number of high school vaping and tobacco referrals for the current school year is 70 — half of which are specifically for tobacco. During the 2024-25 school year that number was 63 with a more balanced count of drug and tobacco referrals while the 2023-24 school year saw a total of 88 referrals, 53 of which were for drugs.
For comparison, the San Ramon Valley Unified School District told the Weekly that for the current school year, there have been 32 documented cases of vaping nicotine or marijuana that were recorded in student discipline records across all four of its high schools and its alternative high school. The previous school year there were 39 cases.
And while he was only able to provide data from the current school year, Dublin Unified School District director of communications Chip Dehnert told the Weekly, “It’s my understanding there have only been five incidents of vaping violations at the high school level in Dublin this year.”
“In general, vaping activity at the high school level has been on decline,” Dehnert added.
This generally lines up with what studies have been showing over the last few years and how use among younger people has declined.
“Data from the 2024 National Youth Tobacco Survey showed that 5.9% of middle and high school students used electronic cigarettes in the past 30 days, a decline from 7.7% in 2023,” according to the January 2025 National Center for Health Statistics data report.
The issue, however, is that those teenagers and young adults who do smoke seem to have a tougher time putting their vapes down.
“In this cross-sectional study of 115,191 youths in 8th to 12th grade, weighted prevalence of daily nicotine vaping rose from 15% in 2020 to 29% in 2024 among current vapers and unsuccessful quit attempts increased from 28% to 53% among daily vapers,” according to the Nov. 3, 2025 article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association Network.
All four school districts across the Tri-Valley told the Weekly about the ways they are working on helping these students who are addicted.
At PUSD, before receiving referrals, the district offers students the opportunity to go through Healthy Futures, which is an “alternative-to-suspension program” developed by Stanford University’s REACH Lab.
“This program is geared for students who have been found using e-cigarettes or cannabis and/or for any students who are interested in trying to quit,” according to the REACH Lab’s website. “This program is packed with a self-paced lesson, a group 2-or 4-hour teacher or counselor-led curriculum, quitting resources, and more!”
According to PUSD’s coordinator of safety and communication, Susanne Frey, the district — much like its peers in the Tri-Valley — try to focus on education and intervention before moving on to other disciplinary consequences, which could include suspension.
“Student health, safety, and prevention are central to Pleasanton Unified School District’s approach to addressing vaping and substance use,” Frey told the Weekly. “Our focus is on education and intervention to support students in avoiding and stopping nicotine and substance use, rather than relying solely on punitive measures.”
She also said site administrators have implemented preventative and responsive measures to address this problem, including constant restroom monitoring and constant communication with students about the consequences of vaping, both from a health and educational perspective.
Livermore also touted its anti-tobacco use grant that helps educate students about the negative effects of vaping and smoking and San Ramon Valley noted its health classes, which include tobacco and drug education, and its partnership with the Contra Costa County Office of Education and the Discovery Counseling Center to provide targeted support.
But according to students like Sharda, presentations and lectures might not work as well as the school districts might think they do.
“If you talk to someone who’s addicted, and you tell them it’s bad for them, they sort of already know that,” Sharda said, adding that those students will still convince themselves that smoking is not that big of a deal.
Yadav added while he has seen administrators over the last few years standing by the bathrooms and clearing them out if students are in there too long, those students who smoke are now moving to other areas of the school to continue using their vapes.
That’s why the students overwhelmingly agreed that in order to really get those who are addicted the help they need, it has to come from their peers.
“If the word comes from our peers, if it comes from someone that they know personally, that will have a much greater impact than if some video came out … about this,” Yadav said.
“It’s a really rebellious age where everyone is kind of trying to do what looks cool and what sounds cool to other people, even when administrators, teachers, parents are trying to warn people against it,” Kanetkar said. “When it comes from a peer, it feels less like a lecture, it feels less condescending and it feels more conversational.”
Isabella Burns, a senior at Amador, told the Weekly while she thinks the issue of vaping is very real at school, for the most part vaping is something looked down upon by the majority of other students, which might make it hard for those who are addicted to say anything.
Burns said she believes help should come from those within a student’s inner circle because, at the end of the day, presentations and lectures can only go so far and going to an adult might be more difficult than going to a peer they trust.
“I think friends can do so much,” she said. “I think your friends are really the first people that you have to reach out to, and I think they are going to be the ones to support you the most and be the least judgmental.”
