With some new signage making its way to the district, Clark County Public Schools is reminding its students, staff and visitors its campuses are tobacco-free.

The Foundation for a Healthy Kentucky Chief Executive Officer Ben Chandler and Kentucky Medical Association member Dr. Michael Kuduk made a special presentation at George Rogers Clark High School Wednesday.

State Sen. Ralph Alvarado also joined the presentation to say a few words.

“He is one of those true champions of this cause in the state legislature and showed an enormous amount of leadership and trying to get these things done,” Chandler said of Alvarado.

They presented Clark County Schools Superintendent Paul Christy and students with a “Welcome to our Tobacco-Free Campus” sign and thanked the district and board for adopting a tobacco-free school policy.

Clark County is one of 164 school districts in Kentucky that have gone tobacco-free, and one of more than 80 newly tobacco-free school districts that have ordered free campus signage from “Tobacco-Free Students,” a partnership between the foundation and KMA.

The 2019 law, championed by Alvarado, requires school districts to pass tobacco-free policies but allowed them to opt-out if they chose. Tobacco-free includes vaping and e-cigarette use.

“In essence, though, with his leadership, we got passed in this last session, a law which ultimately has led to quite a number of our schools and Kentucky having tobacco-free campuses,” Chandler said. “Only 42 percent of all K through 12 school districts in Kentucky were tobacco-free prior to this law passed. And in just a few months, since the law went into place, we’re up to 95% of all the schools.”

Alvarado said soon, the state legislature would look at trying to pass a “Tobacco 21” bill, which would raise the minimum legal age for tobacco and nicotine sales to 21 instead of 18.

“That’ll hopefully help again to discourage people from being able to use those products on school campuses,” he said.

Alvarado said when legislators started proposing the bill, he thought it would be an easy law to pass, but to his surprise, there was a lot of resistance initially.

“I do want to commend our Clark County school system, our school board, because they took the initiative a couple of years ago,” Alvarado said. “… They came out and said, ‘we’re going to go ahead and enforce this policy,’ just as a matter of local ordinance and they were able to push this kind of policy through. So that gave me a lot of backing. I was very encouraged to see that and now very encouraged to see that so many of the counties around our state have taken the same lead.”

The law, however, did not include funding to cover the cost of signage. So, the goal of the Tobacco-Free Students partnership was to help remove barriers to implementing this health policy by offering free signage on a first-come, first-served basis to the school districts that decided to adopt the policy.

“We’re excited to provide these free of cost to the public schools here in Kentucky,” Chandler said.

Aphreikah Duhaney-West, chief executive officer at Clark Regional Medical Center, also spoke at the ceremony. She said CRMC was happy to support CCPS’ tobacco-free endeavor.

“Our mission statement is making communities healthier, but we know we can’t do that alone,” Duhaney-West said. “We see, unfortunately, the results of tobacco use… We need assistance and help and decision-makers and leaders… to do things like this … because we cannot do it by ourselves.”

In closing, Christy thanked everyone for coming out and for the free signage. Christy also applauded the school board for working to make CCPS campuses tobacco-free over the last few years.

“I’ve been an administrator in schools, elementary, middle school and high school,” Christy said. “I’ve personally seen the effects of what this can do. I’ve seen kids who started at an early age and, unfortunately, developed health issues at an early age because of this. So I’ve seen the effects of that. I’m not a tobacco user never have. So this is something that comes easy for me to do. I’m proud to be a part of it.

“Like they also said, it’s not easy to take on. Because … we still have to deal with it in the schools… So it’s going to take a partnership of all of us trying to work on eliminating this being on our campuses… It’s going to take the work of a lot of people to stay on top of this…

“We’ve done a lot of good things, but we still do have a lot of work to do.”