Six Takeaways from the Virginia Youth Survey You Need to Know
The results of the latest Virginia Youth Survey are in, and they provide a treasure trove of valuable insights into the health of kids and teens across the commonwealth.
The Virginia Youth Survey (VYS) is conducted every other year. It’s an anonymous and optional survey that polls middle and high school students from every corner of Virginia about their experiences with numerous health and wellbeing topics, including substance use, diet and exercise, and other things.
Keep reading to learn Virginia’s progress on six key metrics.
Vaping: 8.1% of high school students reported using an e-cigarette at least once in the past 30 days. That’s a decrease of 6.2 percentage points since 2021! E-cigarette use has been trending downward since a peak in 2019.
Behind the Haze, our youth vaping prevention campaign, works to educate youth on the dangers of e-cigarettes and connect vape users with resources to help them quit. We are also funding 65 organizations across the Commonwealth to implement youth tobacco and nicotine use prevention programming directly with young people.
Cannabis use: 9.5% of high school students used cannabis at least once in the past 30 days, down 3.8 percentage points since 2021. Like vaping, this number has been declining over the past 12 years in Virginia.
For comparison, the latest Youth Risk Behavior Survey, a nationwide survey organized by the Centers for Disease Control, found that 17% of American high schoolers currently use cannabis.
Projects like our Unfazed campaign are working to give youth accurate and trustworthy information about cannabis’s effects on their developing brains. Likewise, the majority of classroom-based prevention programs that we fund also work to prevent youth marijuana use.
Prescription drug use: 2.7% of high school students reported misusing prescription drugs (using them without a prescription or differently than instructed) at least once in the past 30 days, down 3.9 percentage points since 2021. This is another number that has been decreasing since the VYS started tracking it in 2017. And again, Virginia is showing progress over nationwide numbers: The Youth Risk Behavior Survey reports that 4% of high schoolers nationwide currently misuse prescription opioids.
In addition, 0.9% of high schoolers reported using fentanyl. But it must be emphasized that this number could be higher, as it is almost impossible to know when fentanyl is present in another substance.
Virginia’s It Only Takes One campaign remains committed to educating youth about the dangers of fentanyl. VFHY also recently released its Dangers of Fentanyl Module to provide educators with a free lesson to educate high school students about the evolving dangers of fentanyl.
Childhood obesity: 13.7% of high school students are estimated to have obesity based on their self-reported height, weight, and age, which are used to calculate Body Mass Index (BMI).
This is a decrease of 2.7% since 2021, but overall, the obesity rate has held relatively steady over the past decade.
Promoting water consumption is a powerful way to prevent childhood obesity, so the VYS also polls students on their water and sugar-sweetened beverage consumption. 32.2% of high schoolers reported that they did not drink any sugar-sweetened beverages in the week preceding the survey. This is a slight decrease of 2.4% since 2021, but overall, this effort has trended positively since 2011.
Rev Your Bev is our campaign to encourage kids to make water their number one drink of choice throughout Virginia. VFHY also supports 30 Healthy Communities Action Teams across the state that are working on issues like promoting access to water during the school day.
The bottom line: We’re thrilled to see so much progress toward reducing youth substance use and childhood obesity. However, these numbers show there’s still plenty of work to be done, and we won’t stop our work until all Virginia youth can live their healthiest lives.
What’s next? We’re on the lookout for the full results of the nationwide 2023 Youth Risk Behavior Survey to better understand Virginia’s progress. VFHY is also working on providing regional data from the VYS to make this information more accessible and easier to apply.
