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Thursday, October 1, 2009
North Platte Telegraph Smoking inside the hallowed halls of higher education is a memory reserved for another generation, but eliminating the use of cigarettes and other forms of tobacco around college campuses is a subject that only recently has been broached. The man who led the effort to free the first college campus in the nation from tobacco usage spoke with community members and Mid Plains Community College faculty on Wednesday at the MPCC north campus about how best to implement and then enforce a completely tobacco-free campus. Ty Patterson has been an educator for nearly four decades and was placed in charge of eliminating tobacco use at Ozarks Technical Community College in Missouri. "When I was first approached by the college president I looked around for other colleges who have implemented a tobacco-free policy," said Patterson. "The thinking was why reinvent the wheel, but the problem was that as we looked around, there weren't any other institutions in the country that had adopted a tobacco-free campus policy." The Ozarks adopted their policy in 1999, but waited to implement it until 2003 in order to provide the needed time for students and faculty members alike to adjust to the new policy. The thinking, Patterson said, was that the students already attending the college would be gone before the policy was implemented and students wishing to attend the college starting in 2003 would already understand the policy.
http://www.nptelegraph.com/articles/2009/10/01/news/70000334.txt
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