(March 26, 2004) — Did you know that smoking one pack of cigarettes a day for a year is the same as pouring a cup of tar into your lungs? If you were a Kids Against Tobacco Smoke (KATS) member, you would be teaching facts similar to this to local elementary students. On Tuesday, for the fifth time, KATS members went to an elementary school to inform younger students about the hazards of smoking. For weeks before their first trip in December, KATS members had been meeting to make presentations and visuals to accompany their speeches. “We had to know the material inside out,” said KATS president junior Illya Williams. To learn the information, students referred to the school’s health book, information from the Internet, books and diagrams and informational booklets provided by KATS advisor and health teacher Judy Sanzo. After they had learned the basic information, the team was separated into smaller “educational groups” in which each focused on a specific topic, such as the lungs or chewing tobacco. Another group made a PowerPoint presentation highlighting overall facts about tobacco. The KATS members were now ready to go to elementary schools and teach the younger kids what they had learned. Students got into Principal Doug Dall’s car, “The KATS mobile,” as the club members like to call it, and visited different schools. They have visited Freemont Elementary three times and Dunsmore Elementary twice. According to Williams, they plan to go to Lincoln, Columbus and Monte Vista Elementary Schools by the end of the year. The club not only visited elementary schools this year but also made a presentation to the Board of Education. They plan to give the Board another presentation in the near future. Williams said that they might start to give presentations to middle schools students as well, if the Board of Education approves them doing so. KATS members have been visiting elementary schools for three years now and after each visit, they complete a self-evaluation to help improve and update their material. Last year, the members made an anti-tobacco commercial to aid with their presentations to the schools and updated it this year. Sanzo said that the presentations not only help younger children learn the horrible effects of tobacco smoke, but that the KATS members are also “learning leadership, teaching and how to work as a team.” Sanzo said that the teams have received outstanding evaluations from all the places they have visited. Freemont Elementary fourth grade teacher Suzanne Olson said the KATS members were “wonderful, very informative, made it fun for the kids and had a very hands-on presentation that the children could relate to.”