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Canines who perform such medically necessary tasks for their owners are called service dogs — not to be confused with the umbrella category of “assistance animals,” which includes therapy and emotional support dogs — and under the federal Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA, service dogs may accompany their owners to public access places where pets are often prohibited, including schools.
But while some Upper Valley schools have found a way to integrate assistance dogs into the learning environment, others are still figuring out how to accommodate students’ growing interest in bringing their four-legged helpers into school.
Three years ago Lillie Gurney, now 10, of Weathersfield, was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes, a chronic illness that means her body does not produce enough insulin to regulate her blood sugar levels. Her service dog, a yellow Labrador retriever called Otto, has been trained to “alert” whenever Lillie’s blood sugar level climbs too high or falls too low.
“He alerts, like, a hundred times a day,” said Lillie during an interview at the Weathersfield School earlier this fall. Before she got Otto, she relied on a system called continuous glucose monitoring, which involves inserting an electrode under the skin to measure blood sugar levels.
“I hated it. I cried like crazy when I had to put it in,” Lillie said. With Otto, the alerts come more often and with greater accuracy than with the continuous glucose monitoring system, said her mother, Deborah Gurney.
The alerts are also painless, even pleasant. During an interview at the Gurneys’ home last week, Lillie’s blood sugar level had dipped to about 75 milligrams per deciliter; the “ideal” level is around 100 mg/dL. If it gets too low, Lillie said, “I can’t see, and I’m dying sweating, and I feel crazy and I can’t think.” She also risks falling into a diabetic coma or seizure.
Smelling this on her breath, Otto gently pushed his nose into the palm of her hand, giving it a few licks for good measure.
“Go eat some Smarties,” her mom told her. After Lillie brought up her blood sugar, though, Otto alerted again; this time, her glucose was 147 mg/dL, a rapid and significant spike from what it had been just a few minutes ago. If her blood sugar gets too high, she risks damaging the blood vessels in her vital organs.
Lillie started bringing Otto to school with her in the fall of 2016, after he’d completed 18 months of training at a Kansas-based service dog organization.
“Oh my goodness, he was alerting all over the place,” said Principal JeanMarie Oakman in a recent interview. “And almost every time he alerts, she’s too high or too low. … It’s the most amazing thing.”
Oakman expressed her fondness for Otto and her confidence in his alerting abilities. But the Gurneys have recently withdrawn Lillie from the school, partly because homeschooling will allow her parents to monitor her diabetes more closely and without Lillie having to miss school, but also because of a long series of disagreements with Weathersfield School officials about how to accommodate Otto, and what was appropriate to ask of Lillie and her family.
In a phone interview shortly after her decision to homeschool Lillie, Deborah Gurney said it’s been a while coming.
“I told them from day one that Lillie would be having a service dog,” she said. “Since then, it’s been obstacle after obstacle. … I am tired. I’m just tired.”
Oakman said she wanted to ensure that Otto was properly trained before letting him spend his days with students, and she also wanted to roll it out to the school community carefully, so that “nobody had a reason to be freaking out in a bad way” about the prospect of a dog in the classroom.
But Deborah Gurney said Oakman’s precautions involved asking for proof of Otto’s qualifications, and inquiring whether Otto was necessary when Lillie already had other ways of monitoring her blood sugar.
Under the ADA, only two questions are acceptable to ask a person with a service dog: “whether the service animal is required because of a disability,” and “what work or task(s) the animal has been trained to perform,” according to the ADA website.
“We went above and beyond in providing the documentation they asked for,” Gurney said. “We shouldn’t have had to do that, but we just wanted to get Otto into school.”
Even after Otto was cleared to enter, Gurney felt the school’s service dog policy — which did not exist prior to Otto — was unnecessarily stringent when it came to Lillie’s duties as a full-time handler, and that Lillie was “fussed at” by teachers to an excessive degree.
She also said that, based on what she’s seen in online support groups, their experience with the Weathersfield School was “not the norm.” More often, she hears about schools accommodating service animals without fanfare.
But the Gurneys are not the only family to struggle with getting their child’s ADA-protected service dog into school.
A few years ago in Haverhill, the family of Andrew Riley, now 10, clashed with the school district over who was responsible for finding a handler for Andrew’s seizure alert dog, Carina. The ADA states that service dogs must be accompanied by a handler, and Andrew was born with severe disabilities that mean he’s not able to handle Carina on his own. As of now, the Rileys continue to hire, train and pay for Carina’s in-school handlers.
The Rileys also ran into trouble getting Carina into Woodsville Elementary in the first place. Like the Gurneys, they were asked to produce documentation of Carina’s training and to demonstrate his medical necessity to Andrew, said his mother, Jamie Riley, in a recent phone interview. She has filed a lawsuit against the school district.
Kirk Simoneau, with the Manchester-based firm Nixon, Vogelman, Barry, Slawsky & Simoneau, is representing the Rileys. He said he’s heard of a few other instances of schools denying a student’s right to a service animal. One of the highest-profile examples was the Supreme Court case Fry v. Napoleon Community Schools, which involved a 13-year-old Michigan girl with cerebral palsy whose family withdrew her from school because she was not permitted to stay in contact with her service dog throughout the school day. The justices voted unanimously in favor of the student.
Often, when families feel a school isn’t accommodating their child’s service dog, the trouble stems from “ignorance on the part of the school,” Simoneau said, adding that “schools sometimes think they can determine for the family whether or not a dog is necessary” when from a legal standpoint this is not for schools to decide.
Oakman said that while “we all love Otto,” she is also considering how an influx of service dogs at the Weathersfield School could alter how the school runs its day-to-day operations.
“It’s only a matter of time before we have four, five, six dogs here,” she said. “We can’t have them all hanging out in (the office) during recess.”
Even well-trained dogs can be distracting to students, or irritate those with allergies, or place undue responsibilities on staff to help take care of the dogs’ needs, she said. And what if students want to bring in dogs who haven’t been through rigorous training, who are essentially “family pets” that a student wants to bring to school?
“That’s a safety issue,” she said. After all, it’s easy enough to acquire an official-looking vest and a fake certificate of training.
Simoneau called these concerns “ridiculous.”
“Think about how cruel it is for an educator to think that a family would go to all that trouble to dupe the school district,” he said. “It’s asinine to think anyone would go to those lengths to create that level of deception.”
Moreover, he said, just as a dog with a certificate and a vest is not necessarily a legitimate service dog, a legitimate service dog doesn’t necessarily have a certificate and a vest. What makes a service dog is its ability to perform its designated task.
“If the animal does that task,” he said, “then it’s not fraudulent.”
Still, he acknowledged, these disagreements between families and educators highlight the kinds of questions schools will have to contend with as they figure out how to accommodate a growing interest in service dogs, as well as assistance animals. What effect will dogs have on school culture, and who is responsible for what aspects of the arrangement?
“Part of the whole thing here is … there needs to be an interactive process, a back-and-forth conversation about how best to accomplish what needs to be accomplished without disrupting the child’s education or anything else,” he said. “How do we achieve that? Well, that’s what we’re having these conversations about.”
Not all of these conversations have been as strained as the ones in Weathersfield and Haverhill, though. A school counselor from Hartland Elementary School, Amy Treat, runs a therapy dog program out of the school that uses dogs both for emotional support and for educational activities such as literacy-building.
And while Hanover High School currently has no students who use service dogs, the most recent case involved a “service dog-in-training,” said special education coordinator Karen O’Hern. She is one of two faculty members at the high school who bring in therapy dogs from home, despite the school having no concrete assistance animal policy in place.
At Lebanon High School, senior Julie Barber has found an especially dog-friendly atmosphere. Barber has been using a wheelchair since last year, when a tumor in her spinal cord paralyzed the former lacrosse player from the waist down.
Since her diagnosis she’s found a great comfort in her beloved dog, a Cocker Spaniel-Labrador retriever mix named Hazel. Thanks to support from the school administration, Hazel now accompanies Barber to school as her emotional support dog — like a therapy dog, but just for Barber, who said “it would be a lot harder to come to school” each day without her companion.
“Her job is to make you feel better … and she does that just by existing,” Barber said, adding that if there isn’t already a whole research area devoted to how dogs improve mood, “then there should be.”
While emotional support dogs like Hazel don’t technically enjoy the same rights as service dogs under the ADA, Barber said she had no trouble getting Hazel into school; it was as easy as getting the green light from Principal Ian Smith, providing Hazel’s vaccination records and completing an online certification.
The process of getting Hazel access to the school took weeks, rather than a couple of years, as it did for Otto. Deborah Gurney said she might consider re-enrolling Lillie in the Weathersfield School if a turnover in school officials leads to a different mindset in the administration.
“Lillie and Otto taught their classmates many, many valuable life lessons. So many kids know now to ask if it’s OK before running up and petting people’s dogs, and they’ve learned about her diabetes and how to look out for their classmate,” she said. “At the same time, the law is very clear about what her rights are. There is no gray.”
EmmaJean Holley can be reached at eholley@vnews.com or 603-727-3216.