North Penn School District students pose with Mario, a canine member of the district’s Traumatic Event Response Team. (Photo courtesy of North Penn School District)
Outside contractor would allow more regular schedules, say staff
A program that has brought four-legged friends to classrooms across the North Penn School District could expand with some outside help.
School board members recently heard an update about the district’s therapy dog program and ways it could be expanded for future years.
North Penn School District students pose with Mario, a canine member of the district’s Traumatic Event Response Team. (Photo courtesy of North Penn School District)“We are looking to expand this, and most likely we would be doing that by contracting with an agency. The reason is, if you are a handler, it’s really difficult to do your own job, while managing your dog,” said Assistant Superintendent D’Ana Waters.
“There’s days where some of the handlers will keep their dog at home — maybe they did a lot the day before, and they’d like a nap, too, kind of like some of us. So we are looking at contracting with an agency, because that way we could make sure the dogs get to other schools,” she said.
In early 2021 the district announced the formation of a Traumatic Event Response Team team, a group of teachers, counselors and administrators at both the elementary and secondary levels who are available and activated when a school suffers some sort of traumatic event and needs support. The program was formally adopted in summer 2022, and members of that team gave an update to the school board’s safe schools committee in early 2023, to explain what they’ve learned, and where they’ve been needed, over the prior two years, including an update from Northbridge school mental health counselor Trish Pike on how she and her golden retriever Mario and another therapy dog were the most popular members of that team, another administrator said at the time.
Since then, Waters and district Chief Academic Officer Mike McKenna told the district’s safe schools committee in late November, the therapy dog program has continued, but with lessons learned for their human counterparts. Current policies and regulations require that a handler must hold a therapy dog’s leash at all times, which could restrict the number of staff available to provide the service, and dogs must undergo training, certifications, and certain vaccinations, all of which could be difficult to meet.
“It does talk about non-employees as well: most of the policies are written for employees who want to go through the process of having a therapy dog, but there is also guidelines for non-employees” to do so, McKenna said.
Since the program began, “the therapy dogs have really made a lot of people smile, especially our students,” Waters added, with Mario and Pike still deployed as TERT team members, and others also in service.
“The dogs are utilized for social/emotional learning: if students are just having a hard day, maybe something happened in their personal life, and they just need someone to talk to, or someone to comfort them or soothe them in the moment, the therapy dogs have really been useful,” she said.
During emergency responses, the TERT team dogs have also deployed, with Waters citing the passing of a staff member as a case where the therapy dogs were deployed.
North Penn School District students pose with Mario, a canine member of the district’s Traumatic Event Response Team, and Northbridge School mental health counselor Trish Pike. (Photo courtesy of North Penn School District)“It really did provide that sense of comfort and calm for the students: just knowing they had a place to go, a dog to pet if that’s what they needed, was very helpful,” Waters said.
“Sometimes it’s just to pop into a classroom. It could be lessons, learning about animals, a variety of topics,” she said.
Board member Kunbi Rudnick said she’s heard firsthand from her daughters about the benefits of therapy dog visits to schools.
“They are so excited, especially my younger one: she mentions it all the time, she loves them, they make her feel good — and that’s sort of priceless. They go through so much now, our students do, and giving them that little bit of additional support is so important,” she said.
Superintendent Todd Bauer added that he’s also heard requests from some of the district’s roughly 2,000 employees about whether they and their dogs could join the program — and concerns over what that could entail.
“There’s a lot of people who say ‘I want to bring my dog to work,’ and that’s not what this is,” Bauer said.
“Having therapy dogs present is a service, to support students, and help lower stress levels, and improve mental health. But, most of our employees are paid to do something else: teach math, or teach PE, or be a tech assistant, or work in the cafeteria,” said Bauer.
Adding therapy dogs through an outside agency could help expand the service available to students, while minimizing the increased workload for staff who are already tasked with fulltime jobs, the superintendent said.
“Miss Pike, she’s a member of our traumatic event response team, she’s a counselor, a counselor and a dog, that makes perfect sense. But maybe a chemistry teacher and a dog does not,” he said.
Student committee liaison Grace Jiao said she’s seen the dogs in person, but not often enough.
“I absolutely love the therapy dogs. I think they are adorable, and they bring joy to everyone around them. But the staff issue is a huge thing,” Jiao said.
“In my four years, I’ve seen the therapy dogs not even five times. I can count on one hand, how many times I’ve seen the therapy dogs. It’s very hard to catch them, in a hallway or on a concourse, they’re always very busy. I also think students don’t know where to find them,” she said.
The student added that she has also worked in a hospital in Bucks County that also deploys therapy dogs, and that hospital used an outside agency with lessons that could apply to the district.
“This therapy dog had rounds to do: there’s a specific schedule, where if you looked up on their website you could see where the therapy dog is, whether its in their office, or on this specific floor, or in this specific hallway. You know where they are, and where to find them, as opposed to just having them in a busy hallway, in the middle of the school day,” she said.
Bauer answered that he and staff would bring back any outside contract for further discussion by the committee and board and said he hoped students could also deploy their skills to create such an app or web schedule that their peers could use to click and track the locations of the dogs
“A regular cadence, knowing where and when the dog is going to be, on which days, I think would be helpful for people leveraging the resource,” he said.
North Penn’s school board next meets at 7 p.m. on Dec. 10 and 6 p.m. on Dec. 17; for more information, visit www.NPenn.org.
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