Teacher's Pet
Gus the Goldendoodle proves that a comforting paw
can offer strong support for learning
It’s Thursday at Van Buren Middle School, and every kid knows what that means: Gus is coming to school today. “He’s famous!” a boy explains.
Indeed he is. Calm, sweet, and bearlike, the Goldendoodle walks the halls like a rock star. Even the principal, Jeri Heileman, strokes his fur as she talks with a teacher. The students are unrestrained in their adoration. “Hi Gus!” they call out. “It’s Gus!”
What is a 3-year-old dog doing in school? Gus belongs to Language Arts teacher Carol Leyendecker, who went through the therapy-dog training program at Warm Hearts Network, a program of Animal Humane New Mexico. Leyendecker had always wanted to bring a dog to school, after seeing the benefits at an elementary school where she used to work. When she got Gus, she could see that he had all the right qualities. So she signed up with Warm Hearts and began the process of convincing her school to let him join the staff .
Dogs are not a common sight in school, but the practice is growing. Just as visiting dogs have been found to benefit nursing homes, hospital wards, busy airports, and courts, dogs turn out to offer good teaching opportunities in school. They are often brought in to help young children learn to read, because reading to a dog is nonthreatening and enjoyable.
Gus helps at his school just by offering the adolescents a calm and comforting presence. When Mrs. Leyendecker’s 6th-graders settle down to read, Gus serves alternately as a pillow and teddy bear, as girls (mostly) idly stroke his soft curls. The kids have learned the rules of engagement, which mean no hissing, “Gus, c’mere!” The dog himself decides who to visit, and he seems to have a knack for spreading the love around.
Moreover, many students at this Title 1 school in the International District have never known a dog like Gus. Most come from immigrant families and have little experience with a dog who lives inside the house but is not a Chihuahua, Leyendecker says. Many were quite wary of Gus initially, asking if he would jump or bite.
Gus himself was nervous at first, too, sticking close by his person. Now he readily trots outside at recess to play soccer with the boys, or ducks into the front office for a treat.
You might think a dog would be a big distraction in school, but the students have gotten used to him. They’re excited to see Gus, but he’s a familiar face.
This kind of canine therapy has benefits for dog and handler, too, Leyendecker will tell you. It strengthens their bond, and Gus looks forward to it—though he is wiped out the next day, she says. Dogs are chosen for this kind of work because they like interacting with strangers. Warm Hearts has screened, trained, and passed some 30 to 40 Albuquerque dog owners who are regularly visiting hospitals, senior centers, youth centers, and other locations voluntarily to share the love between human and dog.
The three women who founded Warm Hearts started out as part of the nationwide Pet Partners therapy-dog program of the Delta Society in 1990. They spun off as their own nonprofit, with what they believed to be better screening and training standards, in 1998. In 2011 the group became a program of Animal Humane, which provides sponsorship and guidance.
In return, once a month, Warm Hearts evaluators choose which of the dogs available for adoption at Animal Humane show the potential to become therapy dogs. “The requirements for a therapy dog are exactly the same as for a good family dog,” says Warm Hearts acting president Dani Weinberg, a Corrales dog trainer. This “seal of approval” helps the dogs to get adopted, and also promotes the idea that rescue dogs are well suited to the work of helping others.
Weinberg explains that the term “therapy dog” is falling out of favor in some circles because of possible confusion with service dogs, who are trained to help specific people with specific disabilities and have public-access rights under the Americans with Disabilities Act. They prefer the term “visiting dog,” and some groups use the unwieldy term “animal-assisted interventions” to describe what they do.
Basically, a qualified dog needs to be well-trained, calm, tolerant, and enjoy interacting with strangers. The human also needs the qualities and demeanor to promote well-being. Gus and Carol clearly work together as a team in this regard.
Once, she says, Gus went missing and the whole school was put on alert. It turned out that he had followed a kid with a ball–no big deal–but she turned it into an exercise for her distraught class, which wrote a story about what Gus did while he was missing.
Whether he’s listening to students recite their poetry, or just napping under a desk, the Goldendoodle makes for a homey, normalizing presence in an otherwise institutional setting. Anyone who remembers what school was like in adolescence can appreciate that.
Recently the New York Times ran a front-page article on the growing number of college students asking to bring their “emotional support animals” with them to school. The reader response, according to reporter Jan Hoffman, was surprisingly harsh, calling the students coddled and frail. But a generation ago these same students, with their emotional and mental challenges, may not have made it through four years of college.
“Thanks to earlier diagnoses and interventions, these students press on with a courage that many of us could never have imagined for ourselves at that age,” Hoff man writes. “And don’t many of us know well the healing power of an animal who lives with us?”
If animals were more integrated into schools, perhaps the comfort and calm they provide would not be seen as a crutch, any more than the love and care of humans. The fact that so many students started out terrified of Gus (and some special-needs students still are, Leyendecker says) suggests that the loving influence of animals may be needed most where it is most resisted.
