Rocklin, Calif. – In a surprise announcement at each of their schools, two local teens recently learned they would receive a $1,000 gift card as winners of Kaiser Permanente’s 18th annual Don’t Buy the Lie billboard design contest. The winning designs will go up on more than a dozen local billboards around the region later this month.
In the high school category, Blair Hudson, a sophomore at Rocklin High School, was honored for her artwork that depicted a young man smoking a rolled up $100 bill with the message “Smoking will cost you more than your life.”
In the middle school division, Allie DeLong, a seventh grader at the School of Engineering and Sciences in the Sacramento Unified School District, won for her design of an attractive young girl, with the tagline, “She was hot…until she was smoking.”
The winning entries were among more than 8,200 submitted by students from nearly 80 schools that participated in the program. In addition to the billboard contest, Kaiser Permanente’s Don’t Buy the Lie program also provides local schools with health education materials and workshops aimed at preventing youth tobacco use.