These kids flushed so many vapes they ruined their school’s restrooms

It’s an old cliché. The teams sneak into the bathroom to smoke cigarettes, just as the acrid smoke billowing from the boys’ bathroom will go unnoticed by a passing teacher or security guard. The old tradition apparently never died; it developed. Students are now doing it with Vapes instead of cigarettes, which according to recent reports can give you all kinds of cancer.

Either way, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Because the students are still flushing evidence of their secret nicotine use, but instead of foamy cigarette butts, they are flushing out big thick plastic fumes. Kids don’t get smarter, do they?

Students flushed so many vapes that they destroyed their school’s restrooms

CBS Baltimore reported this week that at Bel Air High School in Maryland, students flushing vaping devices to avoid getting caught destroyed several restrooms in just one month, briefly leaving each bathroom partially unusable. (a sentence I struggled to write because I was giggling so hard throughout)

In response, the school has brought in metal detector wands and threatened to make students pay for any damage they cause. The school says each toilet costs them $200 to replace.

This is not an isolated phenomenon specific to a Maryland school. According to a report in The cable as of November 2025, teenage vaping has become integrated into modern school culture, with bathrooms serving as unofficial smoking sections. The old trope I used to think only happened in movies is real, alive, well and thriving.

It’s become such a problem that schools have started pouring money into sensors and monitoring systems that monitor air quality and sound patterns in bathrooms in a wildly expensive effort to catch bathroom fumes in the act. They want to hand out suspensions to offenders, but only a small portion of students are targeted for counseling or addiction support.