Redmond School District
Tom McCall Elementary
1200 NW Upas Avenue
Redmond, OR 97756
PH: 541.526.6400 Fax: 541.526.6401
www.redmond.k12.or.us/mccall
Dear Parents and Guardians:
Today our school received sad news. We learned that our Therapy dog, Jake, died. Jake had a very short but serious illness that caused him to die . When things like this happen, people have all different kinds of reactions, like shock, sadness, fear and anger. Those feelings may rise and fall throughout the day and even for days to come. Your child may want to find a quiet place to talk with you about this event. We suggest answering questions truthfully in words they can understand while avoiding terms like ‘gone away’, ‘put to sleep’ or ‘lost’. Share your beliefs, hopes and faiths about the soul or spirit of pets and encourage the expression of feelings. Children process thoughts and feelings by ‘doing’ so drawing or coloring a special picture of their favorite memories of Jake is very appropriate. By helping guide your child through this experience, you will be giving him or her an important life tool-a model for how to say good-bye and a framework for dealing with death and other significant changes or losses in the future.
Sincerely,
The Staff at Tom McCall Elementary School
The hysteria started on April 4th, 2011 at one Redmond area school with teachers crying and kids sobbing. Everyone was encouraged to spend the day remembering the dog that half of them never even met once.
There are plenty of things in this world that could invoke your empathy. For the majority of people that didn’t have anything to do with Jake, the loss of the library dog isn’t one of them.
When the kids come home, worked up because their teacher put on a show, what do you do?
Children learn from adults. They don’t learn by what adults say, or how we think they should act, or how we tell them we think. They learn to do what people around them are doing, regardless of what anyone says. The old saying Actions Speak Louder Than Words is never more true than when children sense action while you concentrate on speaking words.
It’s fair to say that the majority of faculty at Tom McCall probably didn’t have a big emotional connection to Jake. Yet, the act became a sort of forced group grieving. Today, kids learn that public grief is the only appropriate reaction to deal with death. What about the rest of us who didn’t know Jake? This type of deception is a socially accepted form of lying, coerced by the school faculty. When teachers start lying about the fact that they didn’t have a connection to Jake, it means that it’s not OK for others to acknowledge what becomes a hidden truth. They didn’t know Jake, either. It’s no longer OK to be yourself.
The empty words in the school’s diatribe are just that, hollow reverberations inside a vast chamber of echoes. The children in this story did what you would expect; there was no opportunity here to “share beliefs, hopes and faiths about the soul or spirit of pets”. Supporting the furtherance of this false mimicry labeled as a politically correct “expression of feelings” is about the last thing any reasonable parent would encourage. In this story, the children mimicked the teachers — that is to say, some kids described the teacher’s reactions to the news, while others simply replayed them.
Kids, we’ve got a dog outside. He’s big, furry, adorable, and he can’t get enough of you. Sometimes he’s hard to relate to. He’s big and if you start playing rough, he might hurt you without knowing it. You might not like him for that (Don’t worry, it’s pretty obvious that he feels bad when he figures out that he hurt you.) He’s caring, loving, and affectionate. Kids, that’s the relationship you need to figure out. The one that’s at home every day.
Families have their own real deaths and other major grievances to deal with, there’s no need to contrive one at school. Our personal pets die, and so do family members. Families lose jobs, housing, people lose their minds, the world changes, nature brings hurricanes, earthquakes and tsunamis, murderous criminals shoot protesters, any number of disasters can and do happen. In these cases, it’s natural that suffering overcomes joy. It’s not something to shield our minds from nor something to be ashamed of. I suspect that children shielded from many of life’s suffering possibilities are likely to act more emotional at this type of superficial appeal, believing the lie they are convinced to believe, the lie that they have suffered a huge loss. In the case of Jake, would you still call this protection when it goes beyond the point of deception?