Smoking on campus at Citrus College has been an issue for years.
“The Board of Trustees have the final say. ASCC does not have authority to set campus policy and would not be able to amend the current policy,” Citrus College Dean of Students Mary Ann Tolano-Leveque said.
The Associated Students of Citrus College does not have the authority to decide if the smoking should stop or continue.
“They (ASCC) passed a law that said they didn’t support smoking, but it is no use if it does not go through the Board of Trustees,” Tolano-Leveque said.
Psychology major Brittany Sanders said she has not had much of a problem with people smoking on campus until now.
“The smoking on campus never really bothered me until this year,” Sanders said. “I have been going here since 2017 and each semester it seems to progress, but this semester it has gotten out of hand. The smoking used to just happen in designated areas, but now it’s more free and kind of all over the place. I would most definitely like for it to stop and do whatever it takes.”
Some students have health concerns, like asthma, such as current student and sociology major Amber Wainwright.
“I’ve been going here for about three years and the smoking on campus has just kept getting worse,” Wainwright said. “I would always see students smoking, but it was never this freely… They smoke in groups, which makes the scent of the smoke 10 times stronger. I’d like for it to be stopped for the sake of my asthma.”
Tolano-Leveque stated the steps to ending smoking on campus as follows:
“As student leaders, they could support a no-smoking policy by drafting a resolution and requesting this change of campus administrators,” Tolano-Leveque said. “Student leaders would begin the process by approving the resolution and bringing it to my attention as the Dean of Students and I would take it from there.”
Multiple steps are required to resolve this issue, and it would take about two or three semesters. To make things even more complicated, there is a new group of ASCC representatives every semester, and not all of them will always agree.
The ASCC gets a new group of students every semester. The ASCC did a smoking survey in 2016, and a majority of the students they surveyed voted that they did not want smoking on campus. Tolano-Leveque said she could not share the exact results of the survey. Once the survey was done, the group of students then wrote a recommendation to the Board of Trustees regarding this issue on campus.
Tolano-Leveque said the ASCC students who voted to end smoking before the new students came along must keep their previous votes to themselves. They must not roll over to the new group of ASCC students or influence their opinion in any kind of way.
For further questions, contact Mary Ann Tolano-Leveque at mtolano-leveque@citruscollege.edu.
