Chad Phillips
Bartholomew Consolidated School Corp. expects to receive a few hundred thousand dollars over the next couple years through a settlement with JUUL.
The school board has voted to approve a settlement agreement with the e-cigarette manufacturer after joining a lawsuit against the company.
“The total settlement amount is just under $300,000,” said Assistant Superintendent of Financial Services Chad Phillips. “We expect to actually collect closer to $200,000 after attorneys’ fees. … 50% of that’s supposed to come sometime toward the end of this calendar year, and then two smaller payments each of the following two years.”
Superintendent Jim Roberts said that the school corporation would like to use its settlement funds to help address issues with vaping.
“We joined into the JUUL lawsuit because there has been a tremendous increase of vaping,” he said. “What that remedy or solution looks like for us, we don’t have that.”
“I think Dr. Pleak (Assistant Superintendent Human Resources Gina Pleak) said it best when we were talking about this,” said Phillips. “We would like to use this in a way that actually helps stop kids vaping. We just need to put together a group to really look at that and see what the best use of that is.”
The school board voted in February of 2022 to enter a combined lawsuit with other school districts against JUUL. At the time, Roberts said that schools across the country felt there had been a great deal of effort to get students addicted to nicotine through vaping devices, with JUUL being “the leader in that.”
The resolution approving the joint lawsuit included data on e-cigarette use among youth in the United States, citing the Surgeon General’s reports that usage increased among middle and high school students 900% during 2011 to 2015 and increased 78% among high schoolers from 2017 to 2018 (going from 11.7% to 20.8%). In 2018, over 3.6 million youth — including 1 in 5 high school students and 1 in 20 middle school students — were using e-cigarettes.
“Those statistics are mirrored within our school corporation, and what happens with vaping keeps our administrators very busy, and that’s even down into the elementary school level in terms of what we see with that activity,” Roberts said.
The resolution stated that student usage of JUUL e-cigarettes has created an interruption of the school corporation’s educational mission, caused “diversion of substantial resources” to try to both stop and prevent usage, and poses “a significant risk to the health and well-being of its students.”
The document also cited the U.S. House of Representative’s Committee on Oversight and Reform, which reviewed 55,000 non-public documents from JUUL Labs, Inc. The committee found that the company “deployed a sophisticated program to enter schools and convey its messaging directly to teenage children” and targeted kids as young as 8 years old in summer camps and out-of-school programs.
According to a 2018 report from the U.S. Surgeon General, a typical JUUL cartridge contains about as much nicotine as a pack of 20 regular cigarettes.
JUUL’s website states that its mission is to “transition the world’s billion adult smokers away from combustible cigarettes, eliminate their use, and combat underage usage of our products.”
