It used to take Mary Skrabucha five minutes to walk across the campus of The O’Farrell Charter School in San Diego. Now it takes her twenty, because with Sejera — a golden retriever — by her side, kids and teachers are constantly stopping to say hello.
Sejera isn’t your average friendly retriever. She’s a trained “facility dog” who works with Skrabucha in Family Support Services, The O’Farrell School’s one-stop shop for everything from counseling to applying for food stamps to buying towels donated from Bed Bath & Beyond. In a school that serves students whose families struggle in a variety of ways — poverty, neighborhood gangs, foster care, incarcerated parents — Sejera has become vital to many students’ emotional and psychological well-being.
This is no small job. Researchers over the last decade have amassed a sobering body of evidence showing the inability of stressed students to learn. If a kid is living in an abusive home, for example, or a violent neighborhood, his mind is physically incapable of absorbing lessons when he steps into the classroom. That’s before counting factors like hunger, physical impairment, or diagnosed learning disabilities.
That’s where dogs like Sejera come in. If an O’Farrell student is having a hard time in class, either emotionally or behaviorally, a teacher can send him to see Sejera. The student can play or cuddle with the dog, or just talk with her. Sejera’s calm, comforting presence can often be enough to enable a student to recover equilibrium and return to class. Sejera is so popular that one of the second-grade teachers has put a picture of her on his business cards. He hands them out as rewards, and his students can trade five cards for a recess with Sejera. “Another classroom was having a competition to see who could be the most well-behaved,” Skrabucha recalled. “The students chose spending time with Sejera as the reward.”
Several students wrote letters to Paws’itive Teams, Sejera’s training facility, about her importance to their daily school life. “Sejera motivates us,” said one. “If we do a great job we can visit Sejera, so we do our best because we want to see her.” Another student, who was “scared and felt terrible” after a car crash, wrote that after her teacher let her go see Sejera, “I wasn’t scared anymore.”
“Sejera is my friend,” wrote another student. “If you don’t have a friend she can be your friend.”
Skrabucha had a dog in school before, a terrier that was popular with the kids. But Sejera is the first facility dog, meaning a canine that is trained, but not to the level of a therapy or service dog. Skrabucha had to meet with Sejera’s original handler twice a week for four months to transition the retriever, and Sejera herself went through two years of training with Paws’itive Teams, an organization that trains dogs for a variety of services, from helping veterans suffering from PTSD to accompanying children who have to testify in court, against an abuser for example. The dog may be able to provide comfort in a frightening and traumatic situation.
The use of dogs in classrooms is not new, but the research supporting its effectiveness is sparse and largely anecdotal. “Most teachers working with school dogs intend to influence the social behavior, social-emotional competence, and empathy of their students,” wrote Dr. Andrea Beetz in her study on the use of school dog-teacher teams in Germany. “However, little research on the actual effects of dogs in the classroom exists to back these intended effects.”
Her 2013 study focused on third-grade students, an age that, Beetz noted, can be very stressful for German children, since their future schooling “depends primarily on the achievement during the fourth grade.” Her study found that “the school dog-teacher team seemed not only able to buffer such negative development…but even to enhance school-related attitudes and emotions.” She found a particularly noticeable effect for male children with “insecure attachment representations,” which can occur with a difficult home environment. Her team found reduced stress by measuring cortisol levels using saliva samples before, during, and after stressful tasks. The more boys stroked and cuddled with the dog, “the lower their stress reaction towards the test.”
Her findings track with the more widely researched use of therapy and facility dogs in hospitals. Dr. Wendi Hirsch, the child psychologist on staff at the Kapiolani Medical Center for Women and Children in Hawaii, has seen first-hand how Tucker, the hospital’s facility dog, can make ER trips or years of chemotherapy a completely different experience for children.
“More than half the kids I have here are cancer patients,” she said. “They get in bed with Tucker, snuggle with Tucker. They’ll lift up his ear and tell him secrets. It’s not just ‘cute.’ There’s something going on at a much deeper level.”
Holly Ryan has no question about the power of a dog in schools, whether the hard evidence is there or not. A school psychologist in Minnesota and a native of Newtown, Connecticut, she flew to her hometown with a service dog named Ranger after the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Ranger demonstrated a knack for choosing and providing comfort to both adults and children who had witnessed particularly traumatic events.
Ryan’s Master’s thesis focused on the use of dogs in California classrooms and references the active presence of dogs in therapy settings for at least two hundred years. Despite the wide anecdotal evidence that having a dog in a classroom or school can promote learning and decrease stress, though, she emphasized the need for more clinical studies that can give advocates of dogs in the classroom — like Mary Skrabucha — more weight to the efficacy of their work.
OOf course, having a dog in school is not a silver bullet for kids suffering trauma or difficult home situations. Julie Hecht, a PhD student in Animal Behavior and Comparative Psychology at the City University of New York, pointed out that there is very little evidence that “dogs on their own — without counseling or other therapies — are necessarily effective in assisting people with particular issues.” Andrea Beetz, the German researcher, said that her research indicates the benefits of school dogs are due to the effects of the team (i.e., dog and teacher working together) and not the sole presence of the dog.
In other words, while having a facility dog can ease anxiety, and give stressed or traumatized children an initial point of contact for comfort and safety, it is not a cure-all. Mary Skrabucha isn’t just Sejera’s handler. Family Support Services, which she runs, holds anger management classes and parenting classes, among other programs, and has just started a group for kids with anxiety issues. The Center even has a program dedicated to kids with incarcerated family members. “Can you imagine how stressful that is?” Skrabucha asked. “We want kids to know they’re not alone and we’re there to help them work through it.”
At The O’Farrell School, Skrabucha gives a speech at the beginning of each year focused on a whole-child approach to teaching. “You’re taught how to teach,” she tells the teachers. “But you have to remember that kids are coming in with a suitcase full of baggage. You have a curriculum you need to get through, but Johnny may have witnessed his dad beating his mom the night before, or he may have had no breakfast. You have to recognize when Johnny just can’t learn today, and send him down to my office so we can work with him.”
Therapists come to the school to see students every week, sometimes twice a week. Sejera, says Skrabucha, is an important factor in the lives of everyone at the school, including the teachers, acting as a stress-reducer and a catalyst for helping students deal with whatever trauma or ongoing stressful situation that they’re facing that day or year. But she’s not the only factor.
And dogs aren’t for everyone. In many cultures dogs are considered dirty or dangerous, leading parents to keep their children away from programs that include dogs. Teachers and school psychologists can face stiff resistance from an administration worried about allergies, zoonosis, and bites — although facility and therapy dogs are usually covered by insurance from the organization that trained them. Holly Ryan initially had to hold all of her school-related dog programs outside due to worries about hygiene and allergies inside her school. Meanwhile, when Skrabucha was in the middle of her training to be Sejera’s handler, her principal called her up “yelling and screaming and told me I wasn’t having a dog in the school.” It turned out that a child the next town over had just been killed by a pit bull.
In addition to administrative or community resistance, the dog has to have the right kind of handler, which requires significant training and an ongoing time commitment. “The teacher needs knowledge about insurance, risk prevention, and how to integrate the dog in a useful way in everyday teaching,” said Andrea Beetz.
For Skrabucha, the potential downsides of having and training a therapy dog are worth it. “There was this one girl,” Skrabucha told me, a seventh-grader. “Her mom died of a drug overdose. She was being raised by her great-grandmother. She had a lot of angry outbursts and the mouth of a truck driver.”
The girl came to Skrabucha’s office one day and asked to see Sejera alone. Skrabucha went into the hallway, and when she peeked inside, she saw that girl had lifted Sejera’s ear and talked to her for ten minutes.
When the girl came out, she told Skrabucha, “I’m okay, I can go back to class now.”
