It wasn’t especially surprising earlier this year to learn that area school districts were joining a class-action lawsuit against social media companies, including Meta Platforms, Facebook Holdings, Snap, TikTok and YouTube.

“Basically, some of these social media sites really need to be regulated more,” Mars Area School District superintendent Mark Gross said in a May 3 article in the Butler Eagle.

The lawsuit claims that accessibility to these applications, as well as increasing exposure to negative content on them, has had a direct effect on students’ mental health and well-being over the years, Gross said at the time.

Also, unsurprisingly, social media has an impact in the court system, too.

In a Tuesday assembly at Mars Area Middle School, probation officer Chris Monaco said 70% of juvenile cases he deals with involve online offenses.

Monaco, Adams Township Police Department officers Mike Bordt and Mandy Mudrick and District Judge Amy Marcinkiewicz met with students face-to-face Tuesday to talk about safety on social media and cyberabuse as well as vaping and underage drinking — which often are tied to social media too.

“We see a bad trend with people using social media platforms incorrectly,” Monaco said Tuesday. “And what we want to make everybody aware of is: There are consequences to what you put on social media.”

Marcinkiewicz said she has seen someone as young as 13 years old in her courtroom.

It’s not too early to have these conversations.

Bordt on Tuesday referenced an incident at Mars Area High School in 2022 where a student experienced seizures after vaping.

Vaping among teens also prompted school districts to enter a lawsuit. In June 2020, we reported five school districts in Butler County had joined 90 districts across the country in a federal lawsuit aimed at stopping vaping and tobacco companies from marketing products to children and recovering costs districts incurred battling a growing youth smoking “epidemic.”

The Butler Area, Karns City Area, South Butler County, Mars Area and Moniteau school districts joined the suit against Juul Labs and Altria Group, and its subsidiaries — Philip Morris USA and Nu Mark LLC.

Now, districts, like Moniteau, are seeing a second settlement from that lawsuit. At a recent meeting, the district’s school board approved a settlement in the amount of $6,572. The first settlement of around $21,000 was received by Moniteau in February, and was used to purchase and install 10 vape detectors in high school bathrooms.

The programming at Mars this week will continue at the high school and Centennial school.

Bordt said the result of such programming is often students saying, “Oh, I didn’t realize I could get in trouble for that,” which points to the value of having such programs.

We hope that these conversations do have an impact and applaud Mars Area for its efforts in having these conversations.

— TL