Cigarettes are going up in smoke at Carroll Community College after the school this week banned smoking on campus.
“We are a service to the community being a community college, and so we want to be a role model about healthy environments,” said Sylvia Blair, executive assistant to college President Faye Pappalardo.
On-campus smoking bans have become a trend for schools throughout the country and in Maryland.
Several Maryland schools have banned smoking, including Montgomery College, which banned smoking less than two weeks ago and Harford Community College, which banned it in July 2007. Baltimore City Community College is working to confine smoking outdoors to designated areas.
“Majority rule here is that they support the no-smoking policy,” said John Farv, vice president of Carroll’s student-government organization.
“There is a minority that doesn’t support it, but we also heard their side of the story, and I think the school is offering some type of classes or something that will help them through their withdrawal.”
Towson University, the state’s second-largest college, drafted a plan to ban smoking at the end of 2010 and plans to gather feedback from campus groups over the next year, said Deb Moriarty, vice president for student affairs.
Kristen Guy, president of the student-government association at Towson, said the group also is working on gathering information from the school’s nearly 20,000 students.
“With any type of policy change in general, there are going to be people who are for and people who are against,” Guy said. “With this one, it’s nice that there’s a two-year-ahead notice.”
Smokers said banning smoking at all outside places on campus infringes on their rights.
“They’re just taking it too far if they’re going to go through all those measures,” said Lorren Kaberle, a 19-year-old sophomore at the University of Maryland, College Park, which hasn’t considered a ban.
“I understand that it’s a health concern, but people have the right to do what they want to do.”
Smoking has decreased in recent years among college students, according to an American Lung Association study released this month. About 19 percent of college students in the United States smoke, the lowest rate since 1980; in 1999, about 31 percent reported smoking, according to the study.
Meanwhile, about 36 percent of 18- to 22-year-olds who are not in college smoke, the study shows.
Carroll’s smoking ban takes effect Jan. 2, when the winter term begins. The school will offer smoking cessation classes for students and staff, officials said.
“We need to consider the health of our faculty, staff and students, and with second-hand smoke being such an issue, and this is known nationwide, that we felt we could create a healthier environment by creating a smoke-free campus,” Blair said.
[email protected]
