School can be stressful. Why not take an occasional breather by playing with a dog? Rosie is one of the therapy dogs at Harrison High School, and along with her kind owner, Nancy Scudder, the goldendoodle walks our green, black, and white halls and puts smiles on faces of all ages. She visits the school about once a month.
“Rosie’s been training since 2019, when she was 4 months old,” says Ms. Scudder, “I always knew that if my family were to get a dog, I’d want it to be a therapy dog.”
In addition to being generally well trained in voice commands, Rosie can follow ASL commands as well. This took years of training with various commands. Rosie was home trained with ASL commands by Ms. Scudder. This was a totally different type of training than the general training she got earlier. This training started at not even a year old and is still continuing just to keep them both fluent.
Rosie and Ms. Scudder were here on Wednesday, October 4th, and many students flocked to Mrs. Kauffman’s office during lunch to forget about school pressures for a minute and experience the joy that comes from an emotional support animal. In fact, as I was interviewing Ms. Scudder, I felt nervous. Even though I didn’t know I was noticeably showing this, Rosie immediately perked up and came to my side. She wouldn’t stop nuzzling my hand and arm throughout the whole interview, which did actually make me feel better. Therapy dogs really work!
If you want to visit Rosie, she’ll be here on Monday, October 23rd from 7:30-8:00 in the morning at the high school front doors, and she’ll also be visiting WIldcat Academy in the activity center at 09:15 that same day. Come visit and learn all about this sweet girl.
