Assessment of need in schools: A regional survey of school administrators on tobacco prevention activities

The Southeastern Pennsylvania Regional Tobacco Control Project (SEPA TCP) coordinates tobacco control and prevention activities across a large urban, suburban, and rural seven-county region.

Data will be presented from the Project's 2009 survey of school administrators throughout the region. The purpose of the survey is to learn about existing school-based tobacco control policies and initiatives, and to assess areas of improvement in schools' tobacco prevention activities. The survey sample is randomly drawn from among the approximately 1,400 schools in the seven-county Southeastern Pennsylvania region.

The survey instrument includes questions about schools' tobacco prohibition policies and their enforcement, school-based cessation services, use of tobacco prevention education curricula, anti-tobacco youth empowerment groups, and barriers to implementing tobacco prevention activities. The survey also gives schools an opportunity to request free technical assistance and training from the SEPA TCP to improve their tobacco policies, prevention education, cessation programming, and extracurricular anti-tobacco activities.

Survey findings provide for comparison of school-based prevention data across geographic areas, grade levels, and school sizes and types. Analysis of survey data enables the SEPA TCP to tailor its school-based prevention efforts to those geographic, policy, and/or programmatic areas most in need of intervention. Furthermore, the survey's results provide a baseline measure of schools' current tobacco prevention activities so that the Project's future work to support schools in the implementation of additional anti-tobacco initiatives can be assessed.