This summer, the Seneca Valley School District installed vape-detectors in bathrooms.

It isn't a secret, either. They told parents and students about them.

When a device detects a vape being used, it sends a notification to administrators.

“We are using that as a prevention piece,” said Superintendent Tracy Vitale. “We wanted them to know: These are going in the restrooms. They're not video, just audio. They detect loud noises too, not just vaping, like if there would be a fight. We've found mixed results from that. They're going off a lot.”

An analysis of addiction among Butler County adolescents would be incomplete without mentioning the one addiction that education officials say is rippling through schools: vapor-delivered nicotine.

Center for Disease Control figures from 2018 indicate that about 20.8 percent of high school students use “electronic cigarettes,” as do 4.9 percent of middle school students. Boys tend to vape more, with 22.6 percent of high school boys reporting electronic cigarette usage, for instance.

In the 2017 Pennsylvania Youth Survey, students in the Butler Area School District reported significantly more vaping than state averages.

Overall, 30.9 percent of students in the district reported vaping in the last 30 days, compared to the state average of 16.3 percent. Each individual participating grade (eight, 10 and 12) reported more usage than state average.

Matt Franz, director of operations for the drug testing company Sport Safe, said he's beginning to see schools add nicotine to the list of drugs checked in their tests.

“We field a call every day about nicotine or vaping,” Franz said. “We used to field one a quarter.”

Concerns about vaping range, depending on the source, range from grave health problems to minor classroom distractions. Vitale said the addiction itself is one of her largest worries.

“We just read an article with a statement from a doctor saying that the earlier a student starts vaping, the more likely they are to trigger addictive behaviors in the brain,” she said. “We can talk all day about vaping. We can talk all day about alcohol. We can talk about illegal and legal drugs. But if we're talking about addiction overall, we're finding that it manifests itself in physical ways, health issues, or even if the child's not addicted but someone in the family is, it still impacts them.”