To Miss Mississippi 2014 Jasmine Murray, young people deciding against smoking can be put in terms of dollars and cents — even in a roomful of six- and seven-year-olds.

“For $168, you can buy a Nintendo, you can buy an iPod,” Murray told kindergarteners and second-graders Wednesday at Dana Road Elementary School. “For $2,016, you can buy a new laptop computer. Who wants a laptop? For $20,000, that’s a brand new car or college tuition. Who wants to go to college?

Murray extrapolated the costs of buying cigarettes as part of her platform, 13 Going on 30, which encourages young people to make healthy choices as teens.

“Peer pressure is your peers trying to get you to do something,” Murray said. “There’s negative and positive peer pressure.”

“We were all made to be individuals. We don’t have to do everything that everyone else is doing just because it seems cool.”

Murray held side-by-side photos of healthy and diseased lungs during the 20-minute address to show the pupils the dangers of smoking.

“One simple decision can cause so many problems physically, socially, mentally,” Murray said. “That’s why it’s so important you’re not making those kinds of decisions.”

“So, we’re not gonna smoke, right?” she said to loud cheers and applause from the student body.

Murray’s appearance at the school was the first of two health-related events at the Dana Road school. On Friday, Partnership for a Healthy Mississippi takes its Just Have a Ball program to second- and third-graders at the school. Staff with the nonprofit will have an interactive discussion about healthy eating and developing healthy muscles and organs, then demonstrate with the children using a ball and other sports equipment.

The event starts at 12:30 p.m., according to the organization’s website. Dana Road is the first of six venues on the program’s assembly schedule this winter.

Each student will receive a playground ball of their own to take home, principal Sherry Williams said, adding this week’s health programs couldn’t come at a better time for the school’s age groups.

“I think it’s very important for children at this young age to have information on things like smoking, peer pressure, not bowing down to things like that,” Murray said. “It gives the opportunity to know these things in advance the damage it can do.

“Many years ago, we didn’t know all that, but now we do. It’s important for them to have the right role model to come to school and tell them the right thing to do — stay healthy, stay happy,” she said.

Friday’s assembly has added appeal for faculty and staff because it’s a message that will resonate far beyond the walls of the school.

The Princeton, N.J.-based Robert Wood Johnson Foundation will film the assembly inside the gymnasium to use for health-related initiatives on which the health-based research and advocacy group focuses.

“They will film it so they can use this as part of their nationwide campaign with helping states and schools cure the obesity problem,” Williams said.

Warren County was rated 32nd among the state’s 82 counties in the foundation’s county Health Rankings survey for 2014. The study rated factors including smoking and diet, socioeconomic factors, access to clinical care and the physical environment.