Police blotter

By Melanie Lekocevic

Capital Region Independent Media

RAVENA-COEYMANS-SELKIRK — When Archie the facility dog began his RCS High School education in June, students were lined up to welcome him.

Now, it’s the middle and elementary schools that will soon get facility dogs of their own.

“Some of our staff went and viewed a couple of dogs at breeders with members of our training team and will be adopting next week,” District Superintendent Dr. Brian Bailey said at the December meeting of the board of education. “So Pieter B. [Coeymans Elementary School] and the middle school will also have dogs beginning in January.”

The district was working to identify a staff member at A.W. Becker Elementary School who was willing to adopt one of the dogs and bring them to school each day.

Facility dogs are different from therapy dogs, which come into a school periodically to work to soothe, comfort and aid children a few hours a week. A facility dog is a bigger commitment, and the animal is trained to think of the school as their home, though they do go to their adopter’s home at the end of the school day.

Archie, a black Labrador retriever, came to the district as a puppy and first visited the high school on the last day of school back in June, and has been working with students since the start of the 2022-23 school year in September.

There is a team of five staff members who act as Archie’s handlers and have undergone training to learn how to best work with the dog. Archie is in the school every day and makes the rounds to various classrooms.

“Archie has been doing very well,” Bailey said. “The training team has been working with staff in all three buildings in preparation for what is coming.”

Now that Archie is settled in, the district is bringing in at least two more puppies to work with students at Pieter B. Coeymans Elementary School and RCS Middle School, and is hoping to complete the program at A.W. Becker Elementary School.

“We are looking for a staff member at Becker to adopt one,” Bailey said in December. “If we can’t find an adoptee at Becker — we know you have to be in the right place in your life to adopt a dog — we may place a second dog in one of our other buildings.”

The adopters and handler teams at Pieter B. and the middle school have been working with their new dogs for some time.

“It’s a pretty intense program,” Bailey said. “The staff members are meeting at least weekly both remotely and in person, training with the dog.”

The new pups are Labradoodles — a blend of a poodle and a Labrador retriever.

Once they join their new schools, the dogs will work in a variety of classrooms, Bailey said.

“We try to find programs that have the highest impact, those students who need companionship, and within those programs it has been wonderful,” Bailey said. “I think the greatest thing we can do is increase contact for the dogs. For the dogs, this is their workplace and they have work time and downtime scheduled throughout the day and a pretty fixed schedule.”

Each of the schools have handling teams of four to six adults who work with the dog, so all the burden does not fall on the adoptee, he added.

“I can’t say enough about the people who volunteered to do it — it is a big, big commitment and if you think about it, the other people on the team are training a dog that they don’t own,” he said.

If all goes well, the district may consider bringing a second dog into each school building so more children have access to their services.

The cost of the dogs, and their training, is included in the district’s budget for this school year, but after the cost of purchasing a bred dog and the initial training is conducted, there are lower costs. The district is also anticipating that one of the dogs may be donated as well.

Board of education member Tina Hotaling asked about the costs moving forward.

“What would happen if for some reason we had a very tough (budget) cycle and that was a program we cut,” Hotaling said. “What’s the backup plan for those dogs if they were no longer part of a program in the school?”

Costs are higher at first and are reduced as time goes on, Bailey said.

“The good news is the training becomes significantly less frequent so it’s very intensive in the first year,” the district superintendent said. “A certified therapy dog takes her test at about age 2, so for Archie, his test will be in June of 2024. We’ll be budgeting for 2023-24 in this budget cycle and the rest of the dogs will be testing two years from January. So I think that even if we had a substantial cut in the funding that we have set aside — about $24,000 intended to help with the training, supplies and purchase of the dogs — even if there’s a significant reduction, we would end up not growing the program but we would be able to continue.”

Training takes place bi-weekly for the first six months, then is reduced to once every three weeks and eventually monthly.

“It continues to diminish the longer that we work with the dog,” Bailey said.

Veterinary costs for the animals are covered for the first six months, and after that it becomes the responsibility of the adopter, he added.

“They are really adopted by the staff members,” Bailey said.