Watch the adorable dog taking the yearbook picture.
Video credit: twitter/@sighnatasha
Caitlynn Tibbetts and other members of the staff at the high school in Parkland, Florida decided to include the therapy-dog crew in the yearbook. Yearbooks are hard to complete, but very rewarding as people get to reminisce about the past.
“It’s a balancing act,” Tibbetts, a 17-year-old junior, told BuzzFeed News. “After the shooting we wanted that yearbook to be perfect and had to cover as much as possible. This year, we wanted to give a proper representation of our school and who we are now without giving so much focus to what happened to us in the past. The therapy dogs are the one thing from last year that is permanent and positive.”
Dogs’ crew is unbreakable and an integral part of the school, because a gunman stepped into the campus on Valentine’s Day 2018 and killed 17 students and staff. When teens come out for lunch these dogs are in the hallways to give handshakes and shake their tails in the courtyard.
“There’s nothing a dog can’t fix,” said Lerner, an English and journalism teacher and the yearbook adviser. “I’ll be teaching and in comes a dog and these big 18-year-old adults all the sudden become mushy 5-year-old kids and it’s been such a comfort for us.”
Last October, during makeup picture day, Lerner included the dogs in school’s award-winning yearbook.
“I told one of their handlers about it and next thing I know I had 15 dogs in the room,” she laughed. “We sat them up on chairs, they were smiling for the camera. It was the greatest day of my life.”
“It was such a mood lifter,” Tibbetts said. “Including them was a really good representation of our school and what we have gone through. Seeing them is something we look forward to every day. These dogs are going to be there until the last of us are gone.”
“We are a school where news trucks are always posted outside and there is so much to deal with and show. We want to keep the conversation going in a non-triggering way,” Tibbetts said, “and it’s a hard thing to do to not make it sad and depressing, but still honor who we lost and what happened to us.”
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