School Facility Dog Questions Answered

Ever heard of a school that has four-footed staff members?
Each of Lakeside’s schools has at least one facility dog that is trained to respond to students’ stress, providing a calm and regulating presence.
We recognize that adding a facility dog to your team isn’t cheap. However, grants such as Pennsylvania’s PCCD grant (deadline extended to 9/26/24) can cover the costs, and the impact of these animals is incredible.
We’ve heard teachers say that when it comes to supporting kids with challenging behaviors, dogs are “the closest thing to a magic bullet” they’ve seen.
Many students with backgrounds of trauma have painful memories of unsafe people and can have difficulty building trust and connection with school staff. However, we’ve seen these same students immediately gravitate to facility dogs. Over time, the dogs have been a bridge for those students, allowing them to cultivate trust with people as well.
Research has also shown many benefits of school facility dogs:
“Different positive effects of children’s interactions with animals have been widely documented (Melson & Fine, 2019). These include such things as reduction of stress reactions, depressive mood, anxiety, and aggression as well as promotion of trust, calmness, motivation, and concentration (Beetz, 2017; Gee, 2021)…. More specific to education, there is growing empirical evidence that highly trained dogs can play an important role in supporting students’ learning (Gee et al., 2017).”
The excerpt above is from article entitled, “Facility Dogs in Educational Programs for Young Children: Definition, Rationale, Issues, and Implementation” by Jalongo et al., published in Early Childhood Education Journal in March 2022. doi.org/10.100...
Disclaimer: We do not recommend putting your hand in any dog’s mouth.
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[@TheServiceDogChannel]

Thanks for educating people!

[@NeuroLogic_byLakeside]

Absolutely! Facility dogs can be have such an incredible impact - we've seen them make a big difference for students who were struggling.