photo by: AP Photo/Seth Wenig, File

A Juul electronic cigarette starter kit is seen at a smoke shop on Dec. 20, 2018, in New York.

Over $280,000 from a nationwide e-cigarette settlement will flow into the Lawrence school district over the next few years, and that means the district can fund new efforts to fight addiction and educate students on the dangers of nicotine.

In 2022, e-cigarette manufacturer Juul agreed to pay out $438 million to Kansas and 31 other states that accused the company of misrepresenting the danger of its vaping products, as Kansas Reflector reported. The Lawrence district is going to receive roughly $284,000 of settlement money in annual payments from December 2023 to December 2026.

The district is obligated to earmark those funds for programs to combat youth vaping and nicotine addiction. But Superintendent Anthony Lewis said Wednesday that “educat(ing) the district’s scholars on the dangers of nicotine” is a critical issue that the district needed to tackle anyway.

“Look at how much nicotine is contained in one Juul cartridge,” Lewis said. A 5% Juul vape cartridge contains around 40 milligrams of nicotine per pod, making it roughly equivalent to a pack of cigarettes, according to a study cited by the National Center for Biotechnology Information.

It’s not yet clear what kinds of initiatives the district might fund with the settlement money, but Lewis said he definitely doesn’t want to take a punitive approach. He said he is not interested in seeing the money expended on detection equipment that can catch students vaping in school buildings, for instance.

“If a vape detector goes off, you catch a kid and suspend a kid,” he said. “Addiction is a real issue, and I’m more interested in prevention and education.”

He would also like some of the spending to be tailored to students who are already addicted to vaping and other forms of nicotine use — students who he said may already feel marginalized.

“What can we do to support our scholars without criminalizing them or putting them out, now that they have this addiction?” Lewis asked.

Another reason to focus on students who are already addicted might be that vaping is already on the decline in Lawrence schools. Lewis noted that the lawsuit against Juul began almost three years ago, and he said that “we’ve seen vape usage decline tremendously since the settlement.” He did not provide concrete data, but he said that was based on the number of students cited in school for vaping-related infractions, which is the metric the district uses to determine vaping’s prevalence.

District spokesperson Julie Boyle told the Journal-World that the district has addressed vaping in a variety of ways, including partnerships with local and state agencies and a series of community forums on health and safety issues.

At the meeting in March where the district accepted its share of the settlement offer, a report in the board’s agenda materials also stated that the district “has remaining claims against other Defendants that have yet to be resolved.” Lewis, however, said Wednesday that he was unaware of any such claims.

“Juul was the only one. There were no other vape companies,” Lewis said.

The federal government raised its age to purchase tobacco and e-cigarettes from 18 to 21 in 2019, and Kansas passed a bill this year that will require Kansans to be 21 or older to legally buy those products starting July 1, as the Associated Press reported.