Monday, October 14, 2024
BY LEE REINSCH
CONTRIBUTING WRITER
DE PERE — Come fall of the 2025-26 school year, a new member of the staff will be tending to fifth and sixth graders at Foxview Intermediate School.
He won’t mind if students rub his ears or call him by his first name.
“Oakley” the Bernedoodle will serve as Foxview’s first official therapy dog.
He’ll be on hand for adoration and liver snaps and to help kids develop the tools they need to reframe negative emotions.
He’ll offer up his furry self for caresses and comfort, and he’ll maintain office hours to support students who just need a moment to decompress.
For the next year, however, he’s basically in canine college, double-majoring in education and psychology.
“There’s lots of research on the benefit of therapy dogs in schools,” Foxview Principal Andy Bradford said. “Really for us, we want to be able to utilize Oakley to help regulate students that might be dysregulated. Animals are calming and therapeutic.”
By dysregulated, Bradford said, he means showing a child signs of upset, distress, or anger, and experiencing difficulty regulating their emotions. When kids are 10, 11, and 12, it’s not uncommon, he said. “It happens every day.”
Bradford said the school benefited from a therapy dog that belonged to a staff member, who moved.
“We had really good results,” Bradford said.
Before Oakley can start his job, he’s got to be able to follow commands and follow directions from multiple people, and eventually be able to be off leash, according to Oakley’s primary handler, Meghan Damsheuser.
She is the technology integration coach at Foxview and De Pere Middle School.
“Right now we are just really learning the basics —training that all dogs go through — and I think once he kind of passes all that, then he’ll be doing a lot more,” she said. “I’m just getting him more relaxed around different kinds of people so it’s really just different kinds of exposure.”
Damsheuser frequently takes him to Voyageur Park, and to her sons’ baseball games, and he meets as many people as possible.
He won’t be doing somersaults or learning to count, however.
“It’s training him in temperament,” Damsheuser said. “He’s got to not get rattled by kids, he’s got to be able to become calm … It’s a lot more training in behaviors than skills.”
Oakley’s roots are part Bernese mountain dog and part poodle.
His mottled gray and brown coat is known as merle; texture-wise, it’s still downy and soft as baby hair.
Oakley is three and a half months old.
“It’s his puppy coat,” Damsheuser said.
It will grow coarser and require frequent brushing and grooming to prevent matting, she said.
Bradford is also training to be a handler, so he can step in should Damsheuser need to step out.
“When Oakley is in Andy‘s office, he realizes he’s at work,” Damsheuser said. “Otherwise he becomes just attached to me.”
Bradford said Oakley’s job duties will fall into three areas.
First and foremost are the daily interactions with students.
“Just being another part of the culture and fabric of our school, just like when you add a staff person or a counselor or social worker or somebody in that capacity,” he said. “It will be just having him here as a presence.”
The second job duty: Oakley really will have office hours. Students who need it will be able to schedule visits with him.
“If you think about a student that may need a sensory break or something during a portion of the day, Oakley can assist that student and support that student,” Bradford said.
The third job duty: For students who are showing more acute emotional distress, Oakley will be able to help and assist those students “like you would with other tools and strategies,” he said.
During his year of training, Oakley will focus on socializing with a variety of people and circumstances and “desensitizing” to stimuli that might send a typical dog into a tizzy.
Things like thunderstorms, fireworks, fire alarms, loud noises, and children in a range of emotional states, according to Oakley’s teacher, Danielle Paradise, dog trainer with Sit and Stay Pet Resort in De Pere.
“The best way of saying it is that they are socializing and desensitizing to (the point) where they can give out the comfort to the child when the child needs it the most,” Paradise, who has been training dogs for a dozen years, said.
“Children have so many different emotions, especially at young ages, where the dog needs to learn how to feed off of them in a positive reinforcement way and help them calm down or make them feel more safe,” Paradise added.
Three other therapy dogs serve schools in the district — Charlee is at Dickinson Elementary School, Casey is at Heritage Elementary School and Rookie is at Altmayer Elementary School.
Funds come from community support and funds generated through the Redbird rally, the district’s annual fall community carnival, picnic, and football game, Bradford said.
Damsheuser and her family had been looking to add a dog to their household when she got Bradford’s email announcing that the district was looking for a family to train and host a therapy dog for Foxview.
“Meghan was willing to make the commitment to go through the whole process and the training, which is obviously very time-consuming and you have to be really dedicated to doing it the right way,” Bradford said.
