Credit: Jane Meredith Adams/ EdSource Today

High school students in Oakland walk by an advertisement for cigarettes.

The National School Boards Clan ended its wellness curriculum partnership with R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. last week, highlighting the longstanding efforts of tobacco companies to influence what students are taught most cigarette smoking.

Officials in California, which has long been a leader in tobacco-use prevention, said it was unlikely schools in the state have used a youth smoking prevention curriculum marketed by Reynolds.

Denise Adams-Simms, a member of the Tobacco Education Research and Oversight Committee, a thirteen-fellow member informational console that oversees the use of state tobacco taxation revenue for research and education in California, said a contempo informal review showed that "nosotros take not seen any schools that are using the R. J. Reynolds program."

The national clan, which represents 90,000 local school board members, including those in the California School Boards Association, announced the cease of the partnership just v days later saying it would promote the Reynolds "Right Decisions, Right Now" youth smoking prevention curriculum. In a statement, the association didn't explicate why it ended the relationship with Reynolds. The group declined farther comment when contacted by EdSource.

Thomas Gentzel, the National School Boards Association's executive director, told the Huffington Mail that the partnership had been nether development for months and involved payments from R. J. Reynolds. He said he did not know the corporeality of the payments but that there had been discussions about tobacco company support for clan activities too as for advertising in the group'due south publication, the American School Board Journal.

In an October. 9 news release, Reynolds described Correct Decisions, Correct At present as a "successful, evidence-based curriculum" that is aligned with Common Core State Standards and designed to educate heart-school students about the dangers of tobacco use and how to make healthy choices. A Reynolds spokeswoman quoted in the release said, "I'd like to come across RDRN (Right Decisions, Correct Now) in every health form in the country."

Reynolds officials declined to annotate on the school boards clan's decision to end the partnership. The visitor said its youth prevention efforts are guided by the belief that smoking is an adult activity and minors should never use tobacco.

Critics of the partnership included U.Southward. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., the Berkeley-based national lobbying group Americans for Nonsmokers' Rights and UC San Francisco professor Stanton Glantz, a leading expert in tobacco use prevention and a critic of the tobacco industry.

"The kids who don't trust the cigarette companies, who call up those companies should just get out of business – they are much less likely to fume," said UC San Francisco professor Stanton Glantz.

Tobacco companies have offered free youth smoking prevention curricula to schools beyond the nation since the 1980s, Glantz said, in what he described as an effort to displace public health anti-smoking curriculum that is critical of the tobacco manufacture.

Tobacco visitor Philip Morris provided more than $26 meg to schools and school districts across the country between 1999 and 2004 to pay for curriculum and instructor training in a drug prevention program known as "Life Skills Grooming," Glantz and co-authors wrote in the Journal of Boyish Health in 2006.

Promoted by Morris and tobacco company Brown & Williamson, the program was found by its evaluators to increment cigarette use among centre school students, the article said, adding that "co-ordinate to the longitudinal evaluation, conducted for Philip Morris and Brown & Williamson, the prevalence of cigarette use in the last xxx days increased among sixth graders completing the first year of the Life Skills Grooming curriculum."

Marketing efforts included paying an active W Virginia land superintendent of schools to be chair of a policy advisory board for the Life Skills Training plan, the article said, citing internal tobacco visitor documents.

The well-nigh effective anti-smoking programs for youth are those that describe tobacco companies as preying upon young people to go them addicted to nicotine, despite its dangers, to brand a turn a profit, Glantz said. "The kids who don't trust the cigarette companies, who call up those companies should just go out of business organisation – they are much less likely to smoke," he said.

In California, most school-based anti-smoking programs are funded by state cigarette-tax Tobacco-Utilize Prevention Education grants, which are reviewed by the California Department of Education besides as the oversight commission. The grant application states that schools are prohibited from using anti-tobacco programs from the tobacco industry.

The state provides grant applicants with a list of anti-smoking programs that various agencies have determined to exist effective. The listing is posted on its Scientific discipline-Based Programs List webpage.

"The land has cautioned all of united states of america to do extensive research on the curriculum nosotros choose, because R. J. Reynolds and other companies accept tried to maneuver their way into prevention, and it'south not really prevention," said Charmaine Monte, coordinator for Tobacco-Utilize Prevention Education grants at the Stanislaus County Part of Education.

To provide tobacco-use prevention, smoking cessation and youth development programs at 17 junior loftier schools and 27 high schools, the Stanislaus County Office of Instruction in 2014-15 received a grant for $2 meg over three years, Monte said. The county's efforts include a 1,000-fellow member youth coalition known as Protecting Health and Slamming Tobacco.

Reynolds said xx,000 schools, as well as the Boy Scouts of America and Big Brothers Big Sisters, have used the Right Decisions, Right Now curriculum.

In a landmark 2006 determination, U.South. District Judge Gladys Kessler in Washington, D.C., found the major tobacco companies guilty of violating civil racketeering laws and lying for decades about how they market place their products to children. In her opinion, Kessler said the industry'due south youth smoking prevention programs were designed for "public relations rather than efficacy in youth smoking prevention."

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