Nothing secondhand about this message

Jeff Benson

The fifth-graders at Adams Elementary heard Kim Aceves preach against

smoking last year. But Aceves knows kids aren’t easily hooked by a

single lecture.

Aceves, a Newport-Mesa district substance abuse prevention

teacher, hopes to light a fire under each fourth-, fifth- and

sixth-grade student in the district, so they’ll make wise decisions

involving drugs, alcohol and tobacco. She visits each student three

times before they reach seventh grade, she said.

“I teach prevention awareness to the kids at young ages, so they

won’t start when they get older,” she said. “They’re usually exposed

to it when they’re young, and my goal is to give them information

about it, so they can make good choices.”

Aceves visited Lori Klassen’s fifth-grade classroom Monday to

reiterate her point, and she hopes that by next year she can hook the

kids on the fact that smoking kills.

Students learned that cigarettes can cause cancer, can harm the

heart and lungs and can negatively affect short-term memory and other

senses.

“We learned about cigarettes and how bad they are for you,” Alex

Mazur, 10, said. “She taught us about how many chemicals are in them

and that they’re like bug spray and nail polish remover. People think

they’re cool, but it can hurt them.”

Aceves forewarned students of addiction problems smoking can cause

and said that kids get hooked by watching their friends smoke, by

idolizing television or movie stars who smoke and even by purchasing

candy cigarettes from ice cream trucks.

“How many of you saw the movie ‘X-Men’?” she asked them. “What can

Wolverine do instead of smoke or drink alcohol? Maybe he could drink

water or orange juice or eat an apple. Wouldn’t that be something?”

Aceves equated carbon monoxide, a primary smoking byproduct, to

“breathing in the fumes from the back end of a bus.” Each cigarette

contains addictive nicotine, thick tar and an estimated 4,000 trace

chemicals, she said.

“The smoke goes down your trachea and ‘Boom!’ Now you have tar in

your lungs,” she said. “The doctor won’t be able to suck it out. Once

it’s inside you, it’s inside you.”

She and the class later played a bingo-style game, in which they

had to answer smoking-related questions.

Klassen said she was proud of her class for participating, for

asking questions and for listening.

“I think they’ll do a pretty good job with the information,”

Klassen said. “It’s made such an impact on them that they’ll review

it for days to come. They seemed to respond rather well.”

* IN THE CLASSROOM is a weekly feature in which a Daily Pilot

writer visits a campus in the Newport-Mesa area and writes about the

experience.