Risky actions of local students evaluated

A new survey of local high-school students shows that, per month, more of them use marijuana than smoke a cigarette.

Of the 1,582 students in the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County school system who participated in the 2009 Youth Risk Behavior Survey conducted last spring by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 22 percent reported that they had used marijuana one or more times in the past 30 days. During that same period, 19 percent said they had smoked a cigarette.

A survey of 1,611 local middle-school students taken at the same time doesn't offer the same direct comparison. Seven percent of the middle-school students said they had smoked a cigarette in the past 30 days. When asked whether they had ever used marijuana, 13 percent of the middle-school students said yes.

The CDC conducts the surveys every two years. Statewide results for 2009 will be released later, so a direct comparison between state and local figures is not yet available.

Compared with the state figures from 2007, fewer local students were smoking cigarettes, and more were using marijuana. In 2007, 23 percent of high-school students statewide reported smoking cigarettes in the past 30 days and 19 percent reported using marijuana.

According to the survey results, more students use alcohol than marijuana.

Thirty-seven percent in the local high-school system reported having a drink of alcohol within the past 30 days. Of those, 20 percent reported that they had consumed five or more drinks in a row, which is categorized as binge drinking. Those percentages are slightly less than the 38 percent and 21 percent, respectively, of students statewide who answered "yes" to those questions in the 2007 survey.

Many students are also sexually active. In the new survey, 50 percent of local high-school students reported that they had sexual intercourse at least once, compared to 52 percent statewide in the 2007 survey. Among sexually active high-school students, 63 percent had used a condom the last time that they had intercourse, compared with 62 percent statewide.

Ayo Ademoyero, the director of epidemiology and surveillance for the Forsyth County Health Department, presented the local survey results at the Tuesday meeting of the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County school board.

For Superintendent Don Martin, the most troubling numbers were those relating to thoughts of suicide. Fourteen percent of high-school students and 20 percent of students in middle school said they had seriously considered suicide in the past year. "Those are really high numbers," Martin said.

Statewide, the percentages were 13 percent and 22 percent, respectively.

On the positive side, 74 percent of the 1,611 local middle-school students who took the survey either "strongly agree" or "agree" that they felt good about themselves, and 55 percent reported that they had been physically active for an hour or more on five of the previous seven days.

High-school students were less physically active. Forty-six percent of them reported that they had been active for an hour or more in the past week. That was slightly higher than the statewide average of 44 percent.

On the other hand, high-school students also were less likely than middle-school students to spend three or more hours a day in front of the television. Thirty-five percent of the high-school students spent that much time watching television, compared to 41 percent of the middle-school students.

The surveys also included questions about such topics as fighting, being bullied, being forced to have sex, wearing bicycle helmets and drinking soda. The soda question showed the largest discrepancy between state and local percentages.

Although only 37 percent of high-school students statewide reported having had at least one soda a day in the past seven days, 80 percent of the local high-school students said they had. Although that figure was significantly higher than the statewide average, it was comparable to the 81 percent finding in neighboring Guilford County, where students reported that they had at least one soda a day in the past seven days.

kunderwood@wsjournal.com
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