Ridgewood High ‘Smoke Shack’ Demolition Set

New Port Richey, FL — The old smoke shack on the Ridgewood High School campus will no longer exist after Friday morning.

Officials from Pasco County Schools plan to demolish the structure at 7650 Orchid Lake Road at 10 a.m. Friday as a symbolic act ushering in the district’s new smoking ban that began July 1.

“The smoking structure symbolizes the district’s history of allowing smoking on some campuses; its demolition symbolizes the end of smoking on all district property,” the district wrote in an email to media.

A front-end loader will be used to tear down the structure that was once used by some school district employees to smoke on the Ridgewood campus during work days, the district said. The district plans to destroy other school-based smoking facilities over the summer to ensure that students return to a smoke-free environment when the 2016-17 school year kicks off in August.

The Florida Department of Health in Pasco County estimates that 10,300 Florida minors become “new daily smokers each year,” the district said. “That number is far too high for Pasco Superintendent of Schools Kurt Browning and Students Working Against Tobacco (SWAT) members.”

The smoke shack had been a fixture at Ridgewood since at least 1996, school officials said. It was moved about four years ago near the campus' band room.

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