Meet Millie and Rocky, Palmyra Area School District's new canine employees

Meet Rocky and Millie, two of Palmyra Area School District's new furry employees.

Rocky, a poodle who's only a year and a few months old, works at the high school, and Millie, a Labrador retriever who turned one in March, works at Northside Elementary. These facility dogs began working at the district in late March and are still in the process of getting used to their new jobs.

A facility dog is trained in a similar manner to a service dog but can work with many people serving a wide range of needs, as opposed to being trained for one parson's specific needs.

In this case, Rocky and Millie work for everyone in their respective buildings, students and staff alike.

"There's research that dogs can provide support to students," said Kathy Setlock, director of pupil services at the district. "When I've been there, I've just seen kids being happy around the dog, it provides them a calming influence at times, just being able to sit down and talk to a dog. We want to get to a point where a dog can be in a classroom and maybe just sit when a student is reading."

"Because again, they're not judgmental. Students, especially the younger students, may not want to read out loud to a teacher, they might want to practice. So you can sit there and practice to a dog."

While the dogs are owned and their living costs paid for by the district, they go home each night to their primary caretakers.

Rocky's caretaker, Taylor Stossel, is a social studies teacher at the high school. Millie's caretaker, AmyLea Yingst, is the school nurse at Northside Elementary.

In her second year as a teacher, Stossel said she volunteered to be Rocky's caretaker because she thought it would be a great opportunity to grow and learn with the district. Yingst said that her family had wanted a dog for a long time and saw being Millie's caretaker as the perfect opportunity to get a dog while also doing something that would help the school community.

"It's gone really well on the whole," Yingst said. "She spent about a week and a half just in our home before she came to school, and then she's had a slow transition into school. The first week she was only allowed to come one day, then the next week two days, three days, then four, so now she's coming every day to school."

Along with their primary caretaker, 10 members of each school's staff have been trained to handle the dogs so the duty of bringing them into classrooms all over the building doesn't sit on a single individual. They're in the process of slowly introducing them to the dogs.

The benefits of having the dogs around are several, said Setlock, including helping students with things like test anxiety, reading or presenting in front of their class and even inspiring them during writing times. Eventually the dogs will be trained with the school counselors, allowing students to be in the room with the dog while speaking to the counselor if they need it.

Stossel says that she's already reaped the benefits of having Rocky in her classroom, seeing a calmer, happier classroom with better attendance and more engagement.

"You can kinda see the tension leave their bodies whenever he comes near them. If they're stressed out, Rocky walks up to them, he'll put his head right on their lap and next thing you know, they're [calm]. You can like, kinda feel that," Stossel said.

Rocky has quickly adjusted to the classroom, she said, happy to be around the students. He loves especially when the students do gallery walks where he's able to walk around and with students inside the classroom.

Millie has settled in similarly well, spending a large part of her day in the nurse's office with Yingst, being visited by students and visiting classrooms. She's slowly being introduced to other handlers, who have been taking her on visits around the school.

The students, Yingst said, love having Millie around. They stop to pet her during arrival and dismissal, as Yingst stands with Millie outside the office during those times, ensuring that every student in the school gets some time to see her.

"Initially, we would just go in and the whole class sort of stopped because Millie was there to visit and we went around and greeted the students," she said. "Now that she's been there a little longer, we've gotten where we just sort of pop in and blend in to whatever the classroom is doing."

Millie has helped to draw conversations out of students who might be nervous to go to the nurse's office.

Daniel Larlham Jr. is a reporter for the Lebanon Daily News. Reach him at DLarlham@LDNews.com or on X @djlarlham.

This article originally appeared on Lebanon Daily News: Meet Palmyra Area School District's new facility dogs