photos by Jeffrey Fehder

SARATOGA SPRINGS - Fewer high school students are using tobacco these days, but those who are still picking up the habit do not always get the tools they need to quit, school officials in Saratoga Springs fear.

So teachers at the Saratoga Springs High School will offer smoking cessation classes in early May that they hope will provide tools to help students give up the unhealthy habit.

The eight-week, after-school class is voluntary and will show students the long-term effects that smoking or chewing tobacco can have on their health, as well as the ways the habit affects their personal finances. It will also provide a venue for peer support, organizers say.

The class will also be open to staff members who are trying to quit.

Several students have already indicated their desire to quit and enrolled in the program, said Lynette Whaley, the high school’s 12th-grade principal.

“A lot of the kids who skip classes do so because they can’t get through the day without a cigarette,” she said recently. “Once they realize they’re addicted and they can’t make it through the day, I think we have an opportunity to catch them.”

The cessation class, which will be taught by a health teacher and a biology teacher who quit smoking cold turkey years ago, is a rarity among area high schools, organizers say.

But even before the first class, fears have arisen over whether state funding to train teachers and buy materials for the course will disappear because of New York’s budget woes.

Greg Stevens, the tobacco-free school policy coordinator for Saratoga County, said he hopes state leaders will see the value of such programs and recognize that the progress made in recent years will be sustained only if efforts to combat tobacco use continue.

Campaigns and education efforts undertaken by the school and other anti-tobacco groups have been shown to produce results, he said.

In 2000, 35 percent of 12th-grade students and 20 percent of 10th-grade students at Saratoga Springs High School said they smoked. Eight years later, those numbers had fallen to 22 percent and 12 percent respectively, according to a study by the Saratoga Partnership for Prevention.

Those numbers will fall even further when students are given the tools they need to quit, such as the cessation class, Stevens said.

“Kids are at a stage in their life where they feel fearless, so half of the struggle is just getting them to the point where they say they want to quit,” he said. “But we also have to give them the tools to do that.”

The cessation class is one example of the school district’s recent push to expand and enhance its tobacco-control policy.

Officials have also checkered the school with new signs to make it clear that students — as well as adult visitors — are not to use tobacco while on school grounds.

Staff members patrol the area to look for evidence of smoking, like cigarette butts or the smell of smoke.

Whaley, the principal, said another important change was revising the school’s tobacco policy to include all forms of tobacco use, including smokeless tobacco, which she said has become more common in recent years.

“I don’t know if kids are seeing it from sports figures or in entertainment or what, but we want to make it clear that anything they do with tobacco is not safe,” she said.

Rick Stoddard, a popular anti-smoking speaker who lost his wife to lung cancer, will also speak with students during an assembly on March 5.

Whaley said she hoped the totality of the school’s efforts will be enough to counteract the heavy influence of tobacco companies.

“The marketing is always going to be out there, so we have to do our part to present the other side of it,” she said.