"This is something you do when you're faced with a decision," Krause said.
Future lessons will deal with personal pressure, peer pressure, advertising techniques and facts concerning drugs, according to Washington Township Police Chief Barry Keller.
Those lessons continue at Waynesboro Area Middle School, where the DARE program has been administered to 5,900 students over the years, he said.
"When you teach kids math, you don't teach them math once," Keller said.
On March 5, Blubaugh's fifth-graders learned about the consequences of smoking and chewing snuff.
"It's interesting," Destiny Ridenour said. "Four hundred thousand people die each year because of tobacco."
The children, working in pairs, were asked to guess the percentage of middle-schoolers who said they smoke, according to a national survey. The exercise presented the children with a fictional school with an enrollment of 100.
Dakota Green estimated 25 children, while Wesley Whitmore placed his guess at 11 students.
"Half of the school, so 50 of them and 50 not," Anna Bowling said.
"Hannah had 20, and I had 15, so we decided we'd do it evenly," Courtney Baird said.
The actual percentage?
"The correct answer is 9, 9 percent," Krause said.
He asked the 10- and 11-year-olds to raise their hands if they thought that percentage seemed low, and most hands went up.
"That's good, though," Anna said.
"It'd be better if it was zero," Russell Jones countered.
Krause talked about his own experiences with chewing tobacco, which left him with gum problems and acid reflux.
"Fifteen years of chewing snuff, and one day I decided I had enough. Just like anything else, you have to make up your mind that you're not going to do it," he said.
Krause has worked with DARE in Waynesboro schools throughout his 4 1/2-year tenure with the Washington Township Police Department. His previous job in law enforcement provided him with school resource officer training.
The five certified DARE instructors spend their entire workday at the elementary school on designated days, with visitation lessons like "stranger danger" and "drugs versus medicine" available for other grades, Keller said.
Part of the police chief's early career was spent in DARE education. Hooverville Elementary School served as a pilot school for the program in 1988.
"Those kids were 12 about 20 years ago, and I've had their children come up now and say, 'My parents had you in DARE,'" Keller said.
He said the impact of DARE relationships can be seen.
"I can remember kids at Hooverville being very scared to see me. ... Now it's unusual. They're comfortable seeing an officer in the schools," Keller said. That comfort helps police when children are more willing to call for help or speak to law enforcement in other situations, he said.
DARE teaches that "it's not that everybody's doing it, they can say 'no' and how to say 'no.' I think it's worthwhile on a lot of different levels," Keller said.
The DARE Web site, www.dare.com, states that the program is taught in 75 percent of U.S. school districts.
