There’s a new girl at Northside Middle School, and she’s attracting a lot of attention.
Her name is Mia, pronounced m-ay-ah, and she’s a 6-year-old English golden retriever.
Aware of the stress and anxiety middle school students tend to face, Northside nurse Beth Ballard started to research the impact a therapy dog could have on students. Ballard visited a Chicago middle school in 2017 to learn how staff members there used a therapy dog to help students.
“This was something really near and dear to my heart that — especially for these middle school kids and that anxiety — I wanted to take on,” Ballard said.
Mia has called Columbus home since December 2017 when Ballard officially adopted her as a service dog for the middle school from the Northern Indiana Service Dogs organization.
Prior to her arrival at Northside, Mia served as a psychiatric service dog. In 2017, however, she was in need of a new home to serve.
Knowing she wanted to bring a service dog to the school, Ballard worked with Northside Principal Amy Dixon, assistant principal Evan Burton and Bartholomew Consolidated School Corp. attorney Chris Monroe to create a reasonable policy regarding the use of therapy and service dogs in the district’s schools.
“I said, ‘Hey, I have a real passion for this. Would you be on board?’” Ballard said of the initial request. “They were great. They were a big part of that because they were all on board and I could not have gotten any further without that.”
For more on this story, see Monday’s Classrooms section in The Republic.
