My Epilogue

As I got older I became more perceptive of the world around me and whether it has always been this way or I just started to notice it a few years before the beginning of this research study, therapy animals were all around me. My senior year of high school students started having dogs come to school with them and there was a large fundraising event to get a medically trained therapy dog for a little boy in my town. All of a sudden they were everywhere. In an internship my senior year of high school I was helping out in a third grade classroom when the teacher got the class list for the next year, she was going to have the boy with the medically trained therapy animal in her classroom. I spent the rest of the internship being a student teacher helping with the rest of the school year and also helping her brainstorm how to accommodate having an animal in the classroom and how it would change the dynamics. I was intrigued about therapy animals in classrooms ever since.

I initially intended to interview the students and see how they were affected by the animal in the classroom, but that seemed unrelated to what I was trying to study because the student with a personal therapy animal would not have the animal unless it provided great comfort/skills/services and a personal therapy/service animal doesn’t interact with the other students. This led to interviewing handlers that entered schools for periods of time and could provide the experience of themselves, the animal and the students.

I really enjoyed reading all the survey answers and learning about what makes the best type of visit and how to better prepare students for the visits. It is clear from the handlers responses that the animal truly makes a difference and makes a difference in a way no other intervention can. Animals intervene with affection and care, in a place where a lot of emotions are taken out of the school day because so much learning and knowledge must be crammed into such a short amount of time. They bring a joy and ease to the classroom for even the students that are really struggling. When I have a classroom I would really like to implement therapy animal visits in my classroom (if the district allows it) so my students can reap the benefits. Especially, if I am teaching a younger grade, therapy animals have shown through the literature research and the data collected to secure an enthusiasm of reading. This will greatly help students throughout their educational career and at the very least help them from falling behind at a young age which is discouraging and hard to recover from. I hope that therapy animals will be utilized in more classrooms because honestly in my opinion are an untapped resource. Handlers wish they could reach more students and students need the calmness they can provide, the help the animals can facilitate academically, emotionally and socially.

From the Handlers' Perspective