01:00 AM EDT on Thursday, April 6, 2006

BY ARLINE A. FLEMING
Journal Staff Writer

Yesterday, teenagers from Chariho High School traveled to the district's elementary school classrooms, and to the middle school, with one message on their minds: Kick butts.

Cigarette butts. Tobacco. Smoking.

Yesterday was "Kick Butts Day" at the local schools, an event organized by the Chariho Tri-Town Task Force during which older teenagers championed tobacco-free lifestyles, hoping to influence the younger children not just to kick the habit, but not to start it.

When the seventh and eighth grade students sat down for lunch yesterday, they were served up sides of antismoking information -- pamphlets, stickers, pens -- delivered by four high school students who are members of Chariho's "Teen Teachers."

About 25 high school students are trained for the program, said Kathy Gardner of the Task Force, devoting dozens of school-year hours to the antismoking program. They deliver the message not just to schools, but also to community groups, she said.

"This is centered on tobacco and the hope that, with guidance from these cool high school kids, the younger children will not smoke," Gardner noted.

"I don't agree with smoking. It's just something I feel very strongly about," said Meredith Lindenberg, 16, a teen teacher and high school sophomore.

Lindenberg was joined by Kayla Evans, 18, Kaitlyn McCoy, 15, and Codi Ethier, 17, in setting up a graffiti wall in the lunchroom which offered the younger students an opportunity to express their feelings on a long sheet of paper. The message-filled paper will eventually end up in the hands of tobacco manufacturers, they said.

"Honestly, sometimes I'm shocked," Lindenberg said, when asked if students in middle school and elementary school are smoking cigarettes. "I've seen kids this age smoking," she said, pointing to the students 11 to 13.

"We're from the high school, and we're here to tell you how harmful tobacco can be," said Ethier.

She invited the students to come up and express themselves on the graffiti wall, reminding them that their thoughts have to be appropriate so they can be mailed out as a group message from their school.

The messages, presented in bright markers, offered a clear picture about how some of the students feel about tobacco.

"Yucko, tobacco is wacko."

"Use it. You lose it. Your life."

"Your breath smells."

"We want them [tobacco manufacturers] to stop marketing it to youths," Ethier said. "It's important to get the kids to know that it's not good for them."

During the course of the day yesterday, Gardner estimated that more than 2,000 students heard the Kick Butts message across the district.

At the middle school, the message was delivered during five lunch periods to about 500 students, said Vice Principal Greg Zenion, who said he was later approached by several students who said they were "glad to hear it -- they don't want to start smoking."

"In the course of a day, 1,200 people will die from a tobacco-related illness," said Gardner. "That message really hits home with the kids."

The program, said Gardner, is supported by the state Department of Health. According to information provided by the department's 2005 Youth Risk Behavior Survey that monitors health-risk behaviors among public high school students, some 8,000 students in the state smoke, and 22,600 report that they have tried smoking.

While seventh-grade student Corey Eaton, 13, verbally noted that "tobacco is not cool for kids," a visitor to the graffiti wall expressed in writing an equally significant concern among adolescents in terms of the negative effects of lighting up.

Four words said it all: "Smoking makes you ugly."