Simi Sixth-Graders Board a Bus for Tour of Tobacco’s Dangers

As the sixth-graders from Berylwood Elementary School stepped onto the “Bus of Tobacco Horrors” Thursday morning, they embarked on a one-way trip to “Dead Valley.”

During their 45-minute journey through the tobacco education bus, the students sat in the “Stench” family living room, visited a school bathroom with a toilet full of cigarette butts and stepped on a gigantic tongue that coughed.

“It made me want to throw up,” said 11-year-old Christopher Silva after watching a short video. “I thought it was sick ‘cause the people’s teeth were stained and their mouths were crooked.”

Aiming to reduce the number of children who smoke, the Ventura County Public Health Department sends its tobacco education bus to schools from Simi Valley to Ventura to educate students on the dangers of nicotine addiction. About 10,000 children throughout the county tour the bus each year.

“Anything we can do to help children make good choices--about drugs, alcohol or smoking--is worth the effort,” Berylwood Principal Butch Peterson said. “And the tobacco education bus seems to affect the kids.”

Although some educators are skeptical that such programs discourage smoking, others say the tobacco bus is another way to counteract the messages children get from movies, television, magazines and billboards.

“It’s just another message to young people,” said Kathy Cook, community services coordinator for the county’s tobacco education program. “It tells them, ‘Hey--it’s not cool to smoke.’ ”

Student docents led their classmates on the 45-minute tour around and through the bus, which was donated by South Coast Area Transit and decorated by a local artist and Ventura youths. The program, which costs the county about $75,000 a year, is funded by revenues from the state tobacco tax.

Through hands-on activities, the program teaches students about tobacco advertising and how it targets children, the health effects of smoking and the dangers of second-hand smoke.

The Berylwood sixth-grade group leaders began the tour along the outside of the bus, which was decorated with colorful anti-smoking paintings. In one, a woman with red eyes is smoking a cigarette, while her unborn baby is saying, “Hey Mom! I inhale too!’ ”

In another, a girl is smoking and looking in the mirror, when her reflection frightens her. Ashley Miller, 11, told her peers that tobacco companies often use beautiful models in their ads but that real models don’t smoke.

“She thinks she’s gonna be pretty like Cindy Crawford, but really she’s getting uglier every time she smokes,” Ashley said.

Then the students stepped aboard, and found the bus driver was a skeleton dressed in a cowboy hat with a television set for a head. In a scratchy voice, through yellowed teeth, the “driver” told the students to prepare for the ride of their lives--or deaths.

Next stop: the Stench family living room, where family photographs illustrated the harmful effects of cigarettes, cigars and tobacco:

Grandpa Joseph Stench. Cause of death: cancer of the mouth. Grandma Mary Stench. Cause of death: heart attack.

The Stenches’ motto: “The family that smokes together croaks together.”

The students also visited a pretend school bathroom that was spray-painted with graffiti--”Joe Cool is not so cool” and “Smoking sucks.” Student docent Jaime Nguyn, 11, told her classmates a lot of kids start smoking in the bathroom because their friends are doing it or because they don’t want to get caught.

After leaving the bathroom, the students walked through oversized foam cigarettes into a mouth filled with sores and stained teeth. One student came out of the mouth saying, “That’s nasty. My stomach’s turning.”

Throughout the tour, Cook and her helpers emphasized with statistics the dangers of smoking. Ninety percent of smokers start before they are 18. Three-fourths of teens who try to quit fail.

They also gave each youngster a pretend credit card with the smokers’ help line phone number and a ruler with pictures of normal lungs and lungs with cancer.

By being a guide, Jaime said, she learned that “the tobacco companies are acting like you are a fish and are trying to hook you.”

“The tobacco bus shows you what smoking will do to you,” Jaime said. “Like if you smoke, you might die.”

Sixth-grade teacher Holly Dye said students who passed through the tobacco bus last year couldn’t stop talking about how “gross” and “disgusting” smoking was to them.

“It’s very visual,” she said. “And children are visual learners. Because they have images attached to the message, they’re going to get it. They need something to counteract the images that the tobacco companies put out.”