$99,000 is a significant sum of money.

With a $99,000 grant from the St. Louis County Department of Health, Rockwood will prevent tobacco usage among students starting in the 2011-2012 school year.

“For most of the last decade, Rockwood student surveys have shown consistently decreased rates of tobacco use – smoking and smokeless,” Ken McManus, Coordinator of Rockwood’s Prevention Services, said. “However, between November 2008 and February 2010, the rate of both smoking and smokeless tobacco use rose by 3 percent across the district. ”

The primary goal of the tobacco prevention project is to reverse the current trend.

The main component of this project involves the development of student teams at each of Rockwood’s four high schools to come up with “counter-marketing” campaigns involving the use of media to expose the truth and dangers of tobacco usage.

“Tobacco companies aggressively market to teenagers as a means of sustaining cigarette and smokeless tobacco markets,” McManus said.

The same teams also will work with middle school students to promote the message of tobacco prevention.

“A third component of this project will involve these student teams participating in local and state policy advocacy,” McManus said. “This could include writing letters to editors of newspapers, writing and/or meeting with municipal, county and state legislators and conducting community presentations.”

The teams will be recruited and trained between now through spring break to begin working on successfully implementing their projects at the start of the next school year.

Finally, the grant will allow Rockwood to work with local law enforcement to ensure tobacco retailers are not selling to those under the age of 18.

Principal Dr. Greg Mathison said it is important that tobacco prevention is reinforced during high school, not only in elementary and middle schools.

“It’s never too late to talk about the dangers [of tobacco],” Dr. Mathison said. “When we stop talking about things like this, we forget the seriousness of them.”

Although some students start smoking in high school or before high school, Dr. Mathison said some begin to pick it up in college, so it is important to remind older students of the dangerous effects of tobacco even if they’ve heard it before.

“I know some students smoke, but as a whole, we put a lot of emphasis on living a healthy lifestyle [at MHS],” Dr. Mathison said.

Christina Muscarella, junior, said the new prevention efforts might affect some students, but not all of them. Muscarella said she thought students drinking was a more prevalent issue than smoking at MHS.

“People I know don’t smoke, but I’ve heard other people at school talking about it,” Muscarella said. “I don’t see the point. I’d rather live healthy.”