Animators Help Students With Anti-Smoking Ads

In a room packed with 140 teenagers working at rows of tables, Julian Abbott Whitely was intently focused on the piece of paper in front of him.

Hunched over his desk, the 13-year-old Nobel Middle School student examined his drawing for an anti-smoking ad he was designing.

“I already knew the dangers of [smoking],” he said. “But some of my friends who smoke don’t really care that much about what anyone tells them or the dangers of it.”

Such students are precisely the ones that Nobel teachers have wanted to reach in past programs, and a two-day workshop that ended Wednesday was the latest attempt at spreading this message.

Teaming up with an educational animation company, Nobel held its ninth annual Tobacco Use Prevention Education/AnimAction workshop.

Nobel is one of 27 Los Angeles Unified School District middle schools that is working with the LAUSD-hired AnimAction America Inc. to run the workshops. It is the ninth year AnimAction is working with the project. Each school workshop costs the LAUSD $7,800, said Francine Eisenrod, director of LAUSD Health/Drug, Alcohol and Tobacco Education Programs.

Teachers say hands-on workshops can help drive home the anti-tobacco message to teens.

“There’s a big difference between me getting up and preaching to them and them putting their own ideas into their work,” said Laurie Brown, a Nobel teacher involved with smoking prevention education. “They’re creating their own message by taking information they’ve learned and really applying it.’

The workshop organized students, ages 11 to 13, into groups to create original stories, themes and characters. The concepts were turned into animated flip books, which will then be videotaped for 30-second ads. The public service announcements will be shown later at a school assembly.

All 27 schools will also enter their PSAs in a contest to win a monthlong national broadcast in March on Kids WB, a Warner Brothers Television children’s channel.

The average smoker begins at 14 1/2 and becomes a regular smoker by age 18, according to the American Lung Assn. of Los Angeles County. From 1993 to 1996, teen smoking increased by 23%, the ALA said.