By ANGELE MARAJ
Special to the Herald

When most people hear the term “SWAT,” they tend to think of a well-trained group of law enforcement officers with fancy weapons in highly dangerous situations.

While the mission of the student group SWAT may not be as dangerous, it is equally important.

SWAT stands for Students Working Against Tobacco, a group with the noble purpose of discouraging tobacco use in order to save lives, and Palmetto High School currently has the only SWAT group in all of Manatee County.

The inception of this PHS group can first be accredited to Donna Pasko, a former tobacco user and current Palmetto High School nurse.

“I was a smoker,” stated Pasko, revealing that she smoked for about 20 years. “I started in high school - (back then) it was cool. We had smoking circles, parents smoked. It was just a part of the culture.”

Even when she became a nurse, Ms. Pasko made no moves to quit. She notes that in those times, smoking was widely accepted, and that nurses and doctors could even be seen smoking inside the hospital while making their rounds.

“It wasn’t that I didn’t know any better,” she explains. “I had the knowledge, but I was already addicted to the product.”

So what inspired her to put an end to her addiction? She owes it all, she says, to her students.

Pasko reasons that she felt guilty about smoking in public because of the idea that she might be around impressionable young students who would see her and think it was OK to smoke, too.

“It was humiliation that drove me to do the right thing,” she said.

She explains that she sponsored the group because “(she) just wanted to give something back. I thought that maybe four people would show up.”

So naturally she was surprised when almost 50 people signed up and the club quickly became one of the largest on campus.

Since the group’s recent inception, it has organized an educational booth at the Manatee County Fair, built a float for the Manatee County Children’s Parade and attended a three-day leadership conference at Dayspring in Palmetto, among many other things.

Every student has different reasons for joining the group. Many students within the program have been exposed to the effects of tobacco use. Media specialist Tawanna Peterson has lost her aunt to tobacco and has an uncle who is currently dealing with lung cancer.

Others join to learn, such as SWAT vice president Ian, who has been educated about “leadership and how to help others learn what big tobacco companies do, how they target the youth, and how to help prevent tobacco companies from doing so.”

The students are very pleased with the support they’ve received from the community. Secretary Sam was especially happy with the response at the Children’s Parade.

“The people loved it. They read the cards, they were interested, they wanted to know what SWAT was all about, so we got a pretty positive response from the community,” he said.

Meanwhile, the club’s president, Taryn Courtney, enjoyed the seminar they attended at Dayspring.

“What we learned was how to lead our group to inform other students or other people about tobacco and the danger it presents,” she said.

“Eighty-eight Floridians die every day from a tobacco-related illness,” nurse Pasko related. “It’s just absurd. As a number, it doesn’t seem like much, but when you really think of it in terms of people, that’s about a quarter of the junior class. That’s 88 bodies lying on the floor, and it’s completely absurd.”

Said club treasurer Tony, “This is to inform me and everyone else out there about the lies that big tobacco (companies) set out for and aim at the youth.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: Stories by high school journalism students are published Mondays and Thursdays in the Herald.