FILLMORE : Students Get the Picture on Smoking Risks

Armed with 35-millimeter cameras and bursting with anti-smoking fervor, two dozen Fillmore schoolchildren went on a crusade this fall.

Once each week since October, the fourth- through sixth-grade students from Sespe School have trekked to various locales around their city--including parks, the downtown area and a fire station.

Their mission: to photograph anything related to smoking, from cigarette advertisements to no-smoking signs.

Sponsored by the tobacco education department of Ventura County Public Health Services and a nonprofit group that teaches children how to snap photos, the project sought to make the children aware of how their environment encourages or discourages them from smoking.

Kathy Cook, a health-care assistant for the county, said advertisements or the sight of people puffing cigarettes can send the message to children that smoking is OK.

“They see it in advertising,” Cook said. “Parents use it. Friends use it. Pretty soon, it becomes a natural part of their life. If we can make children aware those cues are there, maybe we’ll have a better chance of them not giving in.”

The county has run a similar anti-smoking photography program with students in Newbury Park, she said.

With both projects, a Newbury Park group called “Through Children’s Eyes,” which is dedicated to teaching children photography, lent the youngsters cameras and taught them how to use the equipment.

Last week, Sespe students and their supervisors concluded the project by picking their best photos for display around Fillmore.

Cook said her department intentionally chose to focus its anti-smoking message on elementary schoolchildren, even though most young people who smoke don’t begin until they are in junior high.

“If we wait till they’re in junior high,” she said, “the social pressures are so great, we can’t have much influence.”