Let Students and Staff Smoke on LSC Kingwood Campus Again!

Starting just before Spring 2010 semester, a smoking ban was placed on LSC Kingwood. We as students and staff are no longer allowed to smoke in the previously designated smoking areas on campus and are now confined to smoking in only 3 small so-called shelters located in the parking lots. Many of us have 10 minutes in between classes.

It takes approx 8 min to smoke a cigarette, and 5 min to walk to the parking lot. From LSC Kingwoods website: "When our campus conducted its own smoking survey in September, almost 400 students and employees responded," said LSC-Kingwood President, Katherine Persson. "Eighty-three percent of the respondents indicated that second-hand smoke was a concern for them with 73 percent of the respondents concerned about long-term health effects." 400 students and employees? Why was this survey not sent out to student email accounts? The official attendance day of record indicates that nearly 9,300 students are now enrolled on the Kingwood campus. So, approx 330 students/staff out of 9,300 students/? staff....decided to ban smoking on campus. We had our smoking areas already in place across campus.

I strongly feel that a better approach to this would have been to issue warnings to those who were not in a designated area while smoking.