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Mill Pond Elementary School's nurse and health teacher will begin presenting the Tar Wars anti-smoking program to fifth graders on Tuesday.

"I am always looking for creative ways to teach kids about topics like smoking, exercise, and nutrition and I came across Tar Wars on the Internet last year," said Mill Pond school nurse Anita Hergert.

Tar Wars is an anti-tobacco education program owned and operated by the American Academy of Family Physicians designed for 4th and 5th grade students and consists of three parts: a pre-activity exercise, a 40-50 minute classroom presentation and a follow up poster contest.

Hergert said they have already completed the pre-activity exercise, which was a pre-test to find out students' impressions of smoking. On Tuesday, she and health teacher Nancy Coleman will begin the classroom presentations, working their way through the 14 5th-grade
classes. The poster contest will take place after that, where the children will convey the message to never start smoking. The posters will be judged and the best three will be entered in the national Tar Wars poster contest.

To get students talking about the upcoming program, Hergert said the art teacher created posters that have been posted around school that say, "Tar Wars - Get Ready."

"The theme is how peer pressure, the media and being cool push them to smoke and the physical implications, such as premature aging, how it effects their skin and teeth, how they smell," said Hergert, who has been Mill Pond's school nurse for seven years. "Seeing the short-term effects will impact them more at the moment than thinking of the long-term."

The Lacey Township Municipal Alliance, the town's anti-drug, alcohol and tobacco abuse organization, contributed $324 to the program to buy red, black and white, rubber Tar Wars bracelets for the fifth-graders.

"Kids are smoking even younger than that," said Tom Faulkner, Mill Pond's Substance Abuse Counselor, an Alliance member who requested the expenditure at the Alliance meeting in January. "There is peer pressure to get friends to smoke."

According to the Tar Wars website, nearly 440,000 deaths in the United States each year can be attributed to smoking or exposure to secondhand smoke. Each day, more than 3,500 children in the U.S. try cigarettes for the first time and another 1,000 become regular, daily smokers.

"I have heard that some of my students have tried tobacco in the past, but I don't believe it is prevalent in my school," said Hergert. "Many of my students are exposed to secondhand smoke at home, though."

Another aspect Hergert and Coleman plan to touch on is the financial impact of smoking. They estimate regular smoking costs users about $200 a month, which, if they didn't smoke they could use the money to buy an item like a Wii gaming system.

"This is my first year doing the program and I hope it is successful so that we may incorporate it into our health curriculum," said Hergert. "I feel the best deterrent to smoking is to educate our children early on about the dangers of tobacco use. It is so much harder to quit than it is to resist that initial temptation to start."

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