Red Ribbon Week

As part of Richardson ISD’s Red Ribbon Week, your child will be receiving a research-based youth e-cigarette prevention program called CATCH My Breath at school during Red Ribbon Week, October 28th – November 1st, 2024. This program is designed to help your child make healthy choices and avoid risky behaviors when it comes to e-cigarettes.

Many teens are curious about e-cigarettes. In 2022, about 14.1% of high school students and 3.3% of middle school students reported having used an e-cigarette in the last 30 days. In some areas, nearly half of high school students have tried an e-cigarette.

Many teens believe that e-cigarettes are safe. In reality, e-cigarettes contain nicotine and toxins, some of which are known to cause cancer. Nicotine is highly addictive, especially to a developing teen brain. What begins as experimentation can easily lead to a lifetime of nicotine addiction.

It does not take that long for young people to become addicted to nicotine because:

• E-cigarettes provide nicotine in doses as large as, or larger than, regular cigarettes
• Children and youth become addicted to nicotine much faster than adults
• Nicotine has more harmful effects on the developing adolescent brain, making it worse for kids than adults
• Nicotine use as a teen raises the risk of using other substances and experiencing addiction later in life

All states prohibit the sale, purchase, or use of e-cigarettes and liquid nicotine (e-liquid) by anyone under the age of 21. Most states also prohibit e-cigarette use anywhere on school property or at school-sponsored events.

Be sure to ask your child what he or she is learning in the program and what he or she thinks of e-cigarettes and cigarette smoking. As a parent or guardian, you have a lot of influence over your child’s choices.

It is not always easy for parents and kids to talk about these topics together. Yet research has shown that when parents tell their teens not to use tobacco, they are much less likely to do so.

CATCH My Breath was created to give you a starting place for communicating about e-cigarettes with your child and is provided nationally by CATCH Global Foundation with funding support from CVS Health. The program is at the core of Be Vape Free, a youth vaping prevention initiative in partnership with the CVS Health Foundation and Discovery Education. To learn more about CATCH programs, materials, and training, visit the CATCH Global Foundation website.

In addition to the three CATCH My Breath lessons, they will also be learning about the impacts of marijuana on the teenage brain with a lesson by Stanford Medicine’s Reach Lab as well as the dangers of Fentanyl with a lesson called Fake and Fatal.

We hope that your student will find this week’s lessons helpful as they think through how they can refuse substances in the future.