Thursday, August 29, 2013

Student Told She Must Attend a Different School Because Teacher is Allergic to Her Service Dog

An elementary school student in Athens, Ohio, has been told she'll need to transfer to a different school because the special education teach at the school was planning to attend is several allergic to dogs and the student has a service dog. According to the article, the dog is trained to "comfort" the child (comforting is not a trained task for a service dog, according to the U.S. Department of Justice) and the child is tethered to the dog to keep her from wandering away (tethering children to dogs is a very dangerous practice).  I think the school is being very accommodating in allowing the child to bring the dog to school at all, if these are in fact the only "tasks" the dog does.  Now, maybe the dog is actually trained to perform tasks that mitigate the child's disability and the article I read just doesn't delineate them.  But if this is all the dog does, it's questionable whether to dog even qualifies as a service dog.

Supposing the dog really is a service dog, though, the school has a responsibility to accommodate both the student and the teacher.  Transferring the child to another school just five miles away, where she'll be taught by an equally qualified teacher following the same individual education plan (IEP), seems like a perfectly reasonable accommodation to me.  The parents are upset, though, and want the teacher to be transferred instead.  I think they are being unreasonable.  And their solution?  Not to send the child to school at all until the matter is resolved.

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