Next school year, Oak Park and River Forest High School will welcome its newest staff member: a four-legged, tail-wagging furry friend set to make a difference in the school atmosphere.

For the past six years, students have had the opportunity to utilize therapy dogs during the end-of-semester DeStress with Dogs event sponsored by Healthy Youth Peer Educators (HYPE), which supports mental health and mental wellness initiatives in the school. Now the OPRF administration is moving to acquire its very own full-time therapy dog.

To obtain the dog, OPRF is partnering with Healing Hearts Comfort Dogs Inc., a volunteer 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that raises and trains working therapy dogs. Healing Hearts trains both comfort dogs, like the ones that have visited OPRF for DeStress with Dogs, and facility dogs, like the one coming to OPRF permanently. The dog will be geared towards supporting students’ mental and emotional well-being, working with classes, support groups, individual students and school-wide events to help create a supportive, positive atmosphere at school, according to HYPE Sponsor and Prevention and Wellness Coordinator Ginger Bencola, who has been pioneering the move to obtain the dog.

Unlike the rest of the staff at OPRF, the dog is not being paid through taxes. A grant from the Cebrin Goodman Center will help cover the one-time placement fee, as part of the funding they provide each year to support many of our prevention and wellness programs and initiatives. However, the primary handler, Bencola, is responsible for the full-time care of the dog.

“As the primary handler, I’ll be taking on having the dog live in my home, providing the full-time care, transporting the dog to and from school, and then supporting the dog to interact with students and staff here in the building,” said Bencola. Bencola has been advocating for an on-site therapy dog through various initatives.

“In my role as our wellness coordinator, I have worked with HYPE to bring in therapy dogs for de-stress days each semester and I have also partnered with some of our teachers and classes to bring in therapy dogs to support students with various needs,” said Bencola. “It was a combination of the successful programming that HYPE was running for all of our students, and then collaborating with teachers and staff to offer more support to classes, and seeing the demand and impact of therapy dogs in all of these settings that led us to pursue having a full-time therapy dog.”

Therapy dogs have been particularly impactful on the Special Education program at OPRF. Through Bencola’s initiatives, Special Education Teacher Claire Downs has had therapy dogs visit her instructional literacy and academic strategies classes, giving students a break from traditional academics to engage with the dog.

“It was very therapeutic; you could definitely feel a sense of calm come over the room when the dog came in,” said Downs. “A lot of times it would be a little chaotic in our setting. And when the dog came in, everyone would kind of calm down and relax, pet the dog.”

Lauren Conway, another special education teacher at OPRF, had similar experiences with therapy dogs visiting her classrooms.

“It gets students to come to school if they’re feeling anxious or nervous and were thinking of avoiding school if they know that the dog will be there on a certain day. It helps to get them out of bed and to get them into the building. It helps students to interact with the dog, maybe before they have a big test. It helps them to feel calmer if they’re just feeling maybe mad or crabby for the day. It helps them to feel happier.”

Downs and Conway have been working alongside Bencola to push for an on-site therapy dog. In addition to implementing therapy dogs into their classrooms, Downs and Conway have been major advocates for the administration to obtain a full-time therapy dog.

Many students are looking forward to the opportunity to connect with the future therapy dog. Junior Tate Van Duinen, who has visited the DeStress with Dog events, said, “Dogs provide support without judgment in a way humans can’t.”

“It only brings people joy. So I think the best thing about it, and the main argument, is why not? If it’s something that’s going to bring students and faculty joy, like, why? What’s the harm?” said Downs. “So why not have this extra support? Mainly for social-emotional, but just having another member of our community, that just has four legs.”