One of the highlights of my oldest daughter's 8th grade year has been her Social Studies class.  A year-long assignment (given by Mr. Smith at Horizon Middle School) has given her a new view and confidence, as she took what she loves and turned it into a community-helping venture. 

Mr. Smith's assignment was "Service Learning".  Each student has been required to give 8 volunteer hours to a local charity/non-profit, a tri-mester. McKensie loves animals!  I suggested she volunteer at a local animal shelter, so she could use that love of caring for animals to help the community. 

Since I'm friends with Gail Mackie, Executive Director of SpokAnimal, we went there first.  She's been learning what happens at a shelter, the need that is out there and the importance of helping socialize the animals.

During her/our  volunteer time (I had to volunteer alongside her, as she is under 16 years old) we learned about "fostering".  There are many animals that are too young, underweight or not well enough to be adopted out right away.

Spokanimal is starting up their Prison Dog program at Airway Heights Corrections Center and they’re in need of some last minute supplies to help their training go smoothly.

The program allows some of their dogs to live on-site with an offender to help the dogs become more adoptable, but also help offenders develop a new skills for teamwork, conflict resolution and reduced recidivism.

They’re starting the first week of training for the dogs now and in the next few weeks they’ll start taking the first couple of dogs out to offenders.

These items have been approved by the Airway Heights Corrections so any donations need to be the listed items. The below list applies to each dog in the program. If there's more than one dog, they'll need to double up on this list.  Treats expire so it’s okay to donate cash to go toward buying fresh food in the future.

We stopped by the Office of the Police Ombudsman Tuesday afternoon and learned some horrible news from the interns stationed at the front desk. One of the office fish passed away last week. We asked the interns if the fish had a name and they said it did not have one.

We’re thinking the lack of naming fish is a common theme at the Ombudsman’s office because Tim Burns said in a previous story that he did not have a name for his fish either, unless “Fish” counts.

Burns is not some shadowy figure with an unusual title. He’s just a guy with a fish bowl on his desk trying to make a better community.

He calls his office fish: “Fish”.

In other news, the Public Safety Committee Report is out in paper form for the time frame of March 16th through April 12th. Here's our analysis of the document innards.