Hitting home with message against tobacco use Farmington Firebirds to help fight tobacco use among youths By TERESA RESSEL\Daily Journal Staff Writer The Farmington Firebirds are teaming up with the St. Francois County Community Partnership to combat tobacco use among youth.
The Community Partnership, also known as Caring Community, with the help of the Farmington Firebirds and Project Sunshine, received a $6,378 grant from the Missouri Department of Mental Health's Division of Alcohol and Drug Abuse. The funds will be used to implement a tobacco use prevention program targeting fifth graders in St. Francois County schools, their parents and the public.
Meg Stevenson, who wrote the grant and will oversee the implementation of the project, said the Firebirds players will be the messengers to deliver tobacco education information to fifth graders in an effort to reach them before they start using tobacco products. The message to the public through banners and fliers will be "Model and teach healthy, tobacco-free behaviors to children."
The project will be implemented in early May to coincide with the Firebirds'
practice season.
Stevenson said as part of the project, baseball cards will be created for each of the players with the usual stats and pictures, but also with a message to children about why not to use tobacco.
The group chose to focus on tobacco use after reviewing statistics, studies and surveys that showed there was a high rate of tobacco usage in the county.
Stevenson said rural individuals tend to start smoking or chewing tobacco at a younger age than Missouri's average age. She said they want to be able to reach the children before they start using.
"When studying tobacco use among rural and urban areas in Missouri, it is clear that the rate of cigarette and chewing tobacco use is much higher in rural areas and among males, and children start smoking cigarettes earlier in rural Missouri than the state average age," said Al Sullivan, executive director of St. Francois County Community Partnership. "This is a problem being addressed by this grant project. We are delighted to have the opportunity to partner with the Firebirds on this important project."
Stevenson said the Firebirds general manager, David Cramp, has been wonderful to work with in creating this proposal.
"We are very fortunate to have (the Firebirds) here in our county," she said. "I think it will be a very fun grant to implement."
Students from the county's schools are already taught ways to say no to drugs and tobacco.
The St. Francois County Sheriff Deputy Gary Carver has taught the D.A.R.E.
(Drug Abuse Resistance Education) program at Bismarck, Central, North County and West County schools for the past 11 years. The Farmington Police Department provides the D.A.R.E. program for the Farmington R-7 School District.
The program focuses on fifth and seventh graders and teaches students about friendship, types of peer pressure and ways to say no to alcohol, drugs and cigarettes, as well as ways to handle stress and anger.
Sheriff Dan Bullock said the partnership's project seems like it will go along with what Deputy Carver teaches in the D.A.R.E. program. He said fifth grade seems to be the good age to start this kind of program because that is about the time they start experimenting.
According to the Missouri Student Survey, tobacco use, which for most adults begins in adolescence, is the leading preventable cause of death in the United States and every year causes more than 440,000 deaths.
The survey showed the average age of initiation for cigarette use was 11.48;
12.17 for alcohol use; and 13.14 for marijuana use. The survey shows males start earlier than females with all substances.