Many students who vape, drink alcohol, or use other drugs do not always fully understand the effect these substances have on their bodies. Tobacco Use Prevention Educators program (TUPE), has been educating local schools on the facts around harmful substances and using them.
TUPE is a class that takes place during smart period and is available to join for all upcoming 10th, 11th, and 12th graders. However, it is mainly rising 11th graders who are chosen to be in the program for the following year.
Applications are due on March 31st, where students are then chosen for follow-up interviews based off of their online written application; eventually about ten to twelve people will be chosen out of all the applicants.
Social studies teacher, and facilitator of the TUPE program Jonathan Hirsch said that what guided him into starting the program was from his own experiences dealing with substances himself.
“Because of my own experiences and how I developed my own experimentation and my own habits, I got into a pattern of drug abuse myself in my late teens that were choices I made but choices I made out of ignorance,” Hirsch said.
Hirsch said as soon as TUPE started presenting, Redwood went from having the highest numbers of vaping or using drugs in the district, to the lowest in every single metric in just four years.
Additionally, Hirsch said that students from middle schools who receive the TUPE presentation in 8th grade are between 65-75 percent less likely to be found in possession on campus as opposed to students who didn’t get the presentation.
“I wanted to make sure that every young person that I could get to listen, would just be willing to listen to the facts; here’s the information, here’s what it does to your brain, here’s what it can do to your muscles if you’re an athlete.”
Kazmier Rubel, a junior and peer educator for TUPE, said he was drawn to TUPE for personal reasons.
“I saw my cousin get addicted to nicotine. It definitely made his life a lot worse, so I felt like I wanted to stop other kids from going down the same path that he did,” Rubel said.
Another peer educator, junior Tatum Buoy, said she was drawn to the program because of the numerous aspects of it.
“My favorite part is there’s so many different ways you can get involved, I think there’s a lot of different avenues you can go down that people don’t necessarily think of. We have different committees like social media, sophomore presentations, and task force,” Buoy said.
The program adapts and shifts their focus toward substances that they see as the most harmful or popular within the community.
“I think the overall goal is to hopefully decrease the rates of vaping smoking in our community, and to spread education; a lot of these products, people don’t really know what they’re using,” Buoy said.
Hirsch said many teens have recently been using oral nicotine such as pouches or gum. The TUPE team is spreading the fact that nicotine, in any form, can increase your risk of heart attack, decrease circulation, and harm muscle recovery.
“We started with about 10 [peer educators] back in 2017, and we were just presenting to 9th graders, then the middle school scene started vaping too so they started asking us for help because no one in Marin was doing what the Redwood team was doing. We were more organized, more confident, in our message because we weren’t trying to persuade anyone, we were just educating people so they can match their actions with their values,” Hirsch said.
