Albemarle High School adds sensors to bathrooms to stop students from vaping

ALBEMARLE COUNTY, Va. (WVIR) - Albemarle High School is working to stop students from vaping in the bathroom.

AHS now has single-stall, unisex bathrooms with detectors installed.

“So the detectors actually are more than just bait, they could actually sense a lot of different things,” AHS Principal Darah Bonham said Friday, September 1. “They can even sense words that may be are alarming, or decimal levels in terms of noise. And obviously things that resonate with, like a chemical type of substance that they can detect.”

Before this school year, AHS had multi-stall bathrooms. Now, stalls are single-user, and sinks are outside the bathrooms.

“So we took four different communal restrooms at the school and turned those into 23 different single-user stalls,” Albemarle County Public Schools Director of Building Services Lindsay Snoody said. “And then in those single-user stalls, one of the concerns was vaping. So we have in each stall a vaping sensor that alerts administrators when needed.”

Principal Bonham says his team has been notified by the detectors more than a dozen times since started Wednesday, August 23.

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