DEERING - Ten-year-old Billy Bryant has already made the decision to never smoke.

The Dawson-Bryant Elementary fifth-grader made this choice because he knew it would make his father, an ex-smoker, proud.

Thursday morning, Karen Pearson of the Family Guidance Center visited Bryant's fifth-grade reading class for the first time this school year. Pearson will be visiting all fifth-grade students in Lawrence County throughout the year, presenting the 10-session TNT Program (Towards No Tobacco), developed by the University of Southern California.

The Family Guidance Center received part of a $250,000 grant from the Ohio Tobacco Use Prevention and Control Foundation, and that grant is funded through the state's tobacco settlement dollars, Pearson said. Other county programs funded through the settlement will include after-school programs and cessation programs for high school students who already smoke. The grant will last for about two more years, she said.

"I'm really excited that Lawrence County has received this big grant. We'll be able to do so much," Pearson said.

Fifth grade students were chosen for this program, Pearson said, because at their age, they begin to have a little more freedom. They may be left home alone more and be less supervised, but most importantly, they will have to learn to make decisions for themselves. They will also enter middle school soon, a time when peer pressure begins to increase.

While the program has been very well-received overall, Pearson said the local culture may cause some initial resistance.

"This is a sore subject for families who grow tobacco," she said. "It's very normal in Lawrence County. But, people in Lawrence County have their kids' best interests at heart. Even if they grow tobacco, which affects their lives, even they don't want their children to smoke. Even they support teaching this to children."

Sometimes, Pearson encounters children whose parents are tobacco users who want their parents to quit. She offers them information and flyers that they can take to their parents.

"The saddest thing is children who want their family members to quit because they have allergies or asthma," she said.

The program also teaches students things besides the dangers of tobacco use, such as the importance of listening, having high self-esteem, how to value themselves, how to become an activist and the importance of good decision-making. In other classes she may teach in the future, Pearson said she will use these lessons.

Further into the program, students will be playing the TNT board game. In this game, she will come back into a classroom, quizzing them on what they have remembered from the previous lesson. Students are divided into teams designated by their "critters," animal cutouts passed out to them. Winners are eligible for prizes, but doing things like talking out of turn or showing disrespect to others will land them in "pits" in the board game. At the end, the students will put together a news broadcast about the dangers of tobacco.

By the end of the third year of the program, Pearson said she hopes to find the students who went through it after they have entered middle school to see how it has worked.

Pearson entered Ronda Hall's fifth-grade reading class and began asking the students about places they may see tobacco products and about brands and products they knew about. The majority of students were able to not only name brands and place, but many of them were able to also name specific brand names and types of cigarettes such as 100s and lights.

Later, she asked a student to read a passage from her TNT book to another student. This student then had to tell what she remembered from the passage to another student who was asked to wait in the hall. That student then had to tell what he remembered to another young man in the hall. Each time the students had to retell the story, they would forget parts of the information. This was an illustration, Pearson later said, of how messages become deleted or distorted when being passed from person to person. Then, this leads to confusion of what is right or wrong.

Then, she asked the students what percentage of seventh-grade students they believed were using tobacco products. Most students estimated that between 50 and 60 percent of seventh-graders were using it. Pearson told them that only six out of every 100 smoke and only three in every 100 use smokeless tobacco. The students' high estimations, she said, were the result of many people thinking that tobacco use is normal.

So far, the students in Hall's class have received the program well.

"Other programs are more boring," said Brad Matney. "This is more fun. I like the critters."

"This is really nice of her to come and tell us this is a bad thing," said Danielle Daniels. "This will kill you. It'll hurt your lungs and it's bad for your mouth."