The day all the dogs came to school
and other campus animal stories
One day at the end of a school year, word got out and all the dogs came to school. We had puppies. We had three-legged dogs. We had cow dogs. All the dogs were the very best dogs, and no dogs got into any arguments. This is the joy of a small-town school: you can do things unthinkable in a regular school.
I’ve already written about the horses, which kids sometimes ride on the last day of school. When I taught speech class, the demonstration speech often elicited livestock. We had steers for grooming, heifers for judging, and once chute-loading for a rodeo.
That incident was one for the school record books. The “chute” was temporarily constructed out of gates hauled in by the student and hastily staked into the grass. He missed all his morning classes to build this contraption behind the library in anticipation of his before-lunch demonstration. The grassy spaces in back of the buildings all connected, so students from the elementary school would need to cross behind the chute to get to their earlier lunch. The horse this student brought was…uncooperative. She was not interested in her makeshift chute, as evidenced by the prancing about, pulling back on her tether, and so forth. Just as the student began the demonstration and had introduced her uncomfortably into the space between the rails, she yanked back on her straps, which were attached to the gates. She pulled the gates off their stakes, freed herself of the tethers, wheeled and raced across the back grassway toward the elementary. The 6th graders were just emerging from their building for lunch. The teachers spotted the oncoming beast and pulled their charges in a quick reversal backwards into the building. A campus-wide lockdown went into effect as my senior and his friends corralled the irritable mare and re-trailered her. Demo over.
Ranch and farm kids1 have certain kinds of animals, and then there are town people with their dogs and cats who came to see our campus as an extension of their yard. For a while, one obnoxious little dog regulated the parking lot, barking and charging everyone walking back and forth on the sidewalk. He was aggressive the way small dogs often are. I offered to squash him with my traffic cone one day. It was an ongoing war.
This gray cat really wanted someone to be his mama. He came around day after day. Kids would let him into the school. Staff would put him back outside. I kept telling our school secretary to take him home. I would photograph him and send her the pics: “Val, come get your cat.” She didn’t want an indoor cat, but maybe an outdoor cat would be okay? After some weeks, she finally adopted him. I asked her how it was going. Her response: “Had some bad luck with Bubba the dog.” The cat got treed. Then he hid in her shop. It’s possible he’s still in there.
Starlings made their homes in the spaces behind the giant letters spelling our school’s name on the front of the building. Occasionally, they would find their way inside. One day I heard screaming outside my door. By the time I emerged from my room, one of our para-educators was telling the story to Val: a bird was chasing her down the hallway! But then it flew into the history room and disappeared. I returned to my class. A few minutes later, the history teacher opened my door: “Is there a bird in here?” No. I went to his room to help him investigate the space where the bird had disappeared, a corner by the floor. No bird there either. But upon returning to my room, there it was, perched nonchalantly on a painting. The kids said it had flown up from under my desk. It circled the room and landed on my lights. We popped out the window screen, darkened the room, and it was gone in about three seconds. It turned out, our boiler-heated pipes stretched from one room to room. There was a wall-hole near the floor where a moderately sized starling could do a magic trick and disappear through it.
One thing I loved about teaching in a small community school was the way people overlooked rules that typically govern entities like this. Want to do a demo speech at a student’s ranch so she can show us how to bottle-feed a calf? Reserve the school van and go. Run into a kid’s auntie at the post office and want to tell her what a good presentation her nephew gave last week? You can do it. Did a kid fall asleep in your 5th period and not wake up when the bell rang? That kid is tired! Let him keep sleeping and call his next teacher to let them know he won’t be on time.
Sometimes it works the other way too, as when kids, or their parents, or sometimes teachers don’t follow important safety or privacy rules and fail to see how that is any different from bending them in the above examples. Truthfully it’s hard to justify, but delightful when the right balance is struck. Because humans, at our best, can enrich each other in ways we may not anticipate. And it’s lovely when we can allow that to happen, even if we’re stretching the boundaries of what’s supposedly acceptable.
Finally, my favorite days of all the days: when the drug dog came to school. Jetta was a good girl, fetching and sniffing and sitting. I’d stand in my classroom doorway and observe her with her handler. Then she’d loll about under the hand of anyone who would pet her. Here is a pair of drug dogs, lounging in the principal’s office, doing no work besides fulfilling a dog’s primary role: to be adorable.
Conversations in the school van with rural kids: "Have you ever seen a cow c-section?" "What? How do you know when your cow needs a c-section?" Commence the descriptive response to that question complete with first-person narrative. Add some dessert: commentary on the satisfaction of pulling calves and a discussion of the difference between a ranch and a farm and what word do you use if you have both?
"Because humans, at our best, can enrich each other in ways we may not anticipate. And it’s lovely when we can allow that to happen, even if we’re stretching the boundaries of what’s supposedly acceptable."
❤️
Here are my favorite animals showing up to school.
-On one of my first days teaching at Lolo, I show up in my pretty dress only to help a guy who's pigs escaped from his pick up truck on Highway 93. Yes, I heard pigs in a dress and heels
-It was the start of high stakes testing and we had just got a lecture about keeping everything standardize, no varying from the script, when in walks a black lab to give everyone kisses.
-At Washington, there was a cat name Herbert who lived near by. He would run across the street, oblivious to cars, to get pets from the kids. He also wanted in the school and often was.
- My class pet, a corn snake, escaped one day, only to show up at an IEP meeting.
-Lots of bats hung out on the school siding.
-Woodpeckers would climb around the trees outside my classroom windows.