Chewing tobacco

Discipline remains the single most common and pernicious problem that educators face in their day-to-day teaching. Drug abuse among the students in schools leads to high level indiscipline and the consequences are strikes, violence, rape, disobedience to authority and damage of school property. Miraa chewing has of late been a major source of indiscipline in secondary schools in Tigania East District. Unfortunately, many well-meaning parents, the clergy and teachers do not see the problem of miraa chewing yet it has far reaching effects on the management of discipline in schools. In light of this the main purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of miraa chewing amongst students on discipline management in day secondary schools in Tigania East District and make necessary recommendations. The study looked at the effects of miraa chewing on discipline management, cases related to miraa chewing among students, measures employed by school management to curb drug menace and if there is effective drug policy in day secondary schools in Tigania East District and identify strategies that could be used by school management to address miraa menace. The study adopted descriptive survey design. Simple random sampling was used to select 10 schools out of 26 day schools for this study. Since the study involved boys in day secondary schools in Tigania East District because the social cultural setting does not allow girls to chew miraa, the method was appropriate as it gave equal probability of the population to be selected. Questionnaires were administered to guidance and counseling teachers, students and interview schedules to principals of sampled schools. Closed-ended and open–ended questions were used to give an opportunity to respondents to express their views. Collected data was analyzed and presented inform of frequency distribution tables, graphs, pie charts and percentages. The analysis showed that miraa chewing by students has varied effects on discipline management in day schools, and further revealed that though there are drug policies in schools, the school administration was not doing enough to enforce the policy. The study recommends for training of more guidance and counsel ling teachers to be able to guide students to change to desired behavior.