GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ) — The Green Bay Area Public School District is joining a mass action lawsuit against a maker of vaping devices.
A Board of Education vote on Monday night put the district on board with other Wisconsin school districts in the suit against JUUL Labs, Inc., filed by San Diego law firm, Frantz Law Group.
“They intentionally marketed their products to children, failed to warn about the harms of this product, and now school districts are having to deal with this issue on their campus on a daily basis,” said William Shinoff, the trial attorney with Frantz Law Group. “Public entities like school districts have the right to seek remedies to be able to deal with this issue appropriately in the future, and not have to use taxpayer funds to deal with the problem that these companies created.”
“Our students self-reported that about 14% of middle and high school students had used a vaping products in the last 30 days [according to a 2018-2019 survey], so we’re just slightly lower than the state average,” said Green Bay Area Public School District Director of Communications and Public Relations Lori Blakeslee. “Vaping is seen as a health risk and so just as we have done with tobacco products, looking at both how do we deter the use on school campus as well as how do we educate, so that students make healthy choices.”
The next step for Green Bay schools is to fill out questionnaires.
“What students and parents know about the harms of this product is far from the truth, and hopefully with being able to provide that education, we’ll now have kids be able to make an educated decision to either stop or to not do it in the future,” Shinoff told WTAQ News. “My clients that have done it already, they’ve seen their numbers drop. That’s just one aspect of it. We also want to be able to provide the funds for school district be able to hire counselors to deal with students that are dealing with nicotine addiction.”
As for the expenses and potential settlement money, Blakeslee is optimistic.
“Should the district be successful in the litigation, it provides resources to the district for both deterring and preventing vaping…What this does is provide us resources to be able to do some education, as well as different deterrent methods such as providing devices in restrooms that would detect vaping,” Blakeslee told the WTAQ Morning News with Matt and Earl.
“The unfortunate part of it is that it’s extremely expensive. It costs anywhere between $3,000 to $5,000 a detector, so when you think about the amount of bathrooms and classrooms at a school, that ends up being a multi million dollar project,” Shinoff explained. “This is not a safe product. Hopefully this is just one step with Green Bay joining on, that they’re putting the children in front of these corporations that are trying to put profit over the health and safety of our kids in our community.”
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