It has become a regular sight now, when you walk by a school, to see groups of students standing, outside the fence or even right in front of the entrance, and smoking. They are of different ages, but there is one thing common – all of them want to look older and all of them don’t care a straw about regulations.

This is one of the phenomena that could be used to support the concept that in terms of development, Bulgaria still has a lot of catching up. Most Western European countries went through this period years ago. Now they are in the stage of introducing severe restrictions on smoking in public places, everywhere. Unlike in those nations, the number of young people smoking in Bulgaria continues to grow. What is more, recent research shows that the age at which children try to smoke for the first time steadily is decreasing. More and more 11-year-olds proudly puff cigarettes.

Although there is a ban on selling tobacco products to people under 18, and the public secret is that there is rarely a tradesman who observes it.

“With cigarettes and alcohol it’s the same – if they don’t sell it to you in one place, you just go to another and you’ll have what you want,” says Alexander Lazarov, who is in 12th grade, already over 18, and by the way, doesn’t smoke. In his class, there are only four people who do. Alexander explains this fact by mentioning that, among other reasons, many of them do sports, which stops them from bad habits.

“When there is a break between lessons and you look to the street, you see about a hundred students smoking and the fewest of them are from the 12th grade,” explains Dian Stamatov, the headmaster of Alexander’s school. According to him, those who smoke most are in ninth to the 11th grades, which means 15- to 17-year-olds. That is his main concern – how to restrict smoking among the under-aged and encourage them to spare their health.

Of course, in the groups next to the school fences, you may easily see very young students, especially girls. They stand with their friends, all made up and dressed up, smoking and pretending to be high-class women. If you try to approach them and ask why do they do it, you either hear the worst swear words in the world for entering their private space or get reluctant and confused explanations.

“I simply like it and most of my classmates do it,” says 14-year-old Mihaela. “Otherwise I will be a loser like the ones who sit over their textbooks during break.”

From his viewpoint, Alexander explains the same thing in different words: “What makes girls smoke is most often that they want to look like some hot chick from another class or they want to draw the attention of a boy. Actually, when they smoke, they always pose.” It is true that among the smoking crowds outside schools, there are few boys.

And what about punishment? After all, the school is an institution with its own laws. When a student has gone astray, there are three penalty steps: reproof, final warning for expulsion and expulsion. The first two seem to be quite ineffective because they are oral only, and most schoolchildren nowadays tend to scorn all kinds of authority. Then there is only expulsion left.

“If I try to expel children for smoking constantly, in the end, the school will be empty,” Stamatov says. According to him, the worst thing is that even when parents know their kids smoke, they very rarely take precautions. After all, the school is a social place where a student “learns both good and bad things”, Stamatov says.

He has been a headmaster for two years and a biology teacher for 13. His experience has taught him that in many respects, he is helpless to change things. During his years of service, Stamatov has witnessed the rapid progression in the number of schoolchildren who smoke.

“Habits haven’t changed,” he says, “Only that smoking now happens much closer to the school building than it used to in past years.”
Children at school are very rarely influenced by the reproof of their teachers. One main reason is that a great number of pedagogues also smoke. Sometimes there even occurs an ugly sight – during breaks, the group of smoking teachers stands in the street not far away from the smoking students. This is multiplication of the double standard, both headmaster Stamatov and student Alexander think. They give yet another example – the Bulgarian MPs, who coin all the laws against smoking, when walking in front of cameras in Parliament, always smoke.

There again comes up the idea of punishment.

“If officers from the sanitary inspection come and see the students with their cigarettes, the one fined will be me. Not the children, not their parents, me,” Stamatov explains. “It is ridiculous – because I have no real way to stop them from doing it – and it is futile because the smoker himself gets away with it.”

Nowadays, students have too many rights and almost no obligations, he sighs. Once during a visit to the Czech Republic, he saw in practice how such a problem could be solved. The Czech students who smoked at school were made to spend certain hours in socially beneficial labour. They cleaned the yard of the school, trimmed hedges or planted flowers. According to Stamatov, this could also work in Bulgaria and it would make such students beneficial to the rest of the children at school.

But while suggesting changes in laws is out of a headmaster’s powers, Stamatov has conceived another idea. He is thinking of launching a project against smoking to be included in the World and Personality lessons of students in 12th grade. The point is to popularise the bad effects of smoking, so that the grown-up students could influence the younger ones through example.

Alexander, who probably will still be in school when that happens, can’t say for sure if such a project would work.

“But at the moment, smoking is accepted like a normal thing by most teenagers and that has to be changed,” he explains. “Furthermore, the school is not being an enemy to parents when it points out to them the flaws of their children.”

Having in mind that things in Bulgaria usually work quite slowly, Stamatov makes a remark: “I prefer that children come to school and smoke rather than be absent from school and not smoke. At least they will become good people and good citizens, even with a cigarette in their mouth.”

Such words sound drastic, but they are true – while in school a child studies and learns. While in school, there are always ways for a child to be influenced and his habits changed.

Cross your fingers; with some help from Parliament and more active schoolmasters in Bulgaria, in several years when walking by a school, we will no longer see large groups of students smoking right in front of the entrance.