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Give Thanks to Police Dogs with Service-Learning
by Cynthia Wetmiller

K-9 Project (Elementary School)

The K-9 unit of police departments can be very instrumental in helping keep communities safe. Not only do K-9 dogs help with rescue efforts, they help police officers fight crime and deter criminals. Unfortunately, not many people are aware of just how important the K-9 unit is to community safety. A great way to teach your students about thankfulness is to encourage them to recognize and be thankful for the protection that local K-9 police dogs give to members of the community.

While police officers are protected by bullet proof vests, K-9 dogs are often without protection from bullets because purchasing protective gear for police dogs is too expensive. Raising funds to purchase bullet proof dog vests isn't the only way students can express their gratitude. Creating an awareness for K-9 safety can help spread the word throughout the community that K-9 police dogs need to be protected with bullet proof vests. By helping raise awareness for these issues, police departments might receive a better response from the community during future fundraising activities.

Here are a few ways that students in elementary school can support their local K-9 unit during this Thanksgiving season:

1. Invite police officers to visit the school for an assembly. The police officers could bring the K-9 police dogs to the assembly and teach the students about the role of the K-9 unit and why protection of K-9 police dogs is vitally important to the police department's anti-crime mission. As a follow-up to this assembly, students can create posters that celebrate the work of local K-9 police dogs and display these posters throughout the community.  In this way, more people will understand the role of the K-9 unit and the reasons why protection for K-9 police dogs is imperative.

2. Students can use technology skills to create informational brochures about the local K-9 unit. Pictures of the police officers and the police dogs can be taken with digital cameras and added to the brochures. These brochures can be displayed in the office of local veterinarians to encourage pet owners to make a donation towards K-9 protective gear for local police dogs.

3. Police dogs are usually big dogs! Feeding large dogs and keeping them healthy can be expensive, especially for a small police department. Students can arrange to meet the K-9 unit of their local police department and interview the handler to learn about the diet of local police dogs. Students can collect money and donate it to the K-9 unit to support mealtimes at the station for police dogs. This can be turned into a great math activity as students collect the money, count it and keep track of how much is raised. Once the money is collected, students can figure out how many police dog meals they were able to buy with the money they collected!

Visit any of these websites for more information about K-9 dogs:

http://www.pettribune.com/2000/110100/feature.html

http://www.cityofstmarys.com/meeting.htm

http://users.stargate.net/~jhfitch/k9/

http://www.whitehallboro.org/police.html#k9