How Toby the dog made St. Johnn’s. home

“If you see this guy, he looks a little bit like Fozzie Bear,” St. John’s Episcopal School Chaplain Shannon Newsome says of her assistant chaplain with a laugh.

As teasing as it may sound, she’s not wrong. Sitting at about 2 feet tall and weighing 26 pounds, the 2-year-old goldendoodle’s curly auburn coat looks as though all it’s missing is a pink polka dot scarf and pork pie hat. But then again, he’s already got an armoire full of costumes for chapel and a staff badge for official duties.

Toby — short for Tobias, or “God is Good” in Hebrew — first arrived on the Old Lake Highlands Campus as a 10-month-old pup a few days before Halloween 2024. Newsome’s children had attended a school with a resident canine previously, something she says impressed her deeply.

“I had actually seen a situation and so it was always inspiring to me,” Newsome says. “It was powerful for my kids growing up. And so it was kind of a dream, I had to bring a dog into our school.”

In what she estimates to have been a year-long process, Newsome consulted with large ISDs and smaller schools with dogs of their own to explore the feasibility and safety of having one at St. John’s. In her research, and despite being admittedly “gunshy” of medium or large dogs, she learned that small dogs are less likely to handle large, overstimulating group environments as well as other breeds, which led to Toby being adopted from California after a year of training.

After therapy dogs were brought in for finals as a test run, school leadership got on board and “hired” Toby as the school’s emotional support dog.

“We went to every single primary and Lower School class with him, and talked about his health and safety and how for the kids to interact with him, and gave real specific instructions, and then kind of reinforced that coming into this school year,” Newsome, who children also refer to as “Chappy,” says.

He’s since become a campus celebrity, with two different colors of T-shirts sporting his likeness and even goldendoodle stuffed animals lining the walls of the campus store. Newsome says he especially enjoys chase, yak cheese sticks and ear rubs.

A typical day begins as Toby arrives on campus each morning, when he and his direct report visit each primary and lower school classroom. After that, he heads to the church to prepare for daily chapel, where he “blesses” with his tongue and stars in live action performances of Bible stories. In the past, he’s been costumed as a bishop, lion, donkey and fisherman complete with a bucket hat.

“Toby always has a role, but somehow everybody seems to always remember what Toby is doing, and that’s how they remember the story,” she says. “So, you know, in Jonah and the Whale, Toby is the whale, or the big fish. He’s got a big ol’ fish head on, shows up and gets on top of the student playing Jonah.”

St. John’s uses the stories to teach students lessons on values like care, responsibility and respect. Along with courage, gratitude, joy, honesty, curiosity and service, they make up the school’s guiding Lion Values.

Jake Minton, the school’s dean for Primary and Lower School, says Toby has helped to reinforce the values, even when he’s not dressed as the school’s mascot.

“Toby’s here to care for us. We’re also here to care for him,” Minton says. “And practicing our care with an animal, helps us get better at it with other humans and with ourselves and so really leaning into that a lot in the primary years.“

After chapel, Toby typically enjoys some vitamin D and exercise while chasing squirrels in the school’s green space, with a nap to follow. Newsome doesn’t want to overwhelm him with both chapel and the carpool line, so his afternoons are typically open. His owner’s office door even has a flippable sign to indicate whether or not Toby is open for visitors.

Other times, however, he has more serious business to take care of.

“Some days, depending on what’s going on with with with kids in the school, Nancy or I or somebody on the student formation team may text or walkie Chappy and say, ‘Hey, we could use a Toby visit over here. We have a friend who would really appreciate seeing Toby right now.’” Minton says.

Nancy Avery, the school’s director of mental health and wellness, recalls one instance where the goldendoodle played a particularly important role.

“We had a younger friend who was struggling a little bit with behavior, and I thought Toby has just been such a great asset for primary and Lower School,” Avery says. “So I reached out to Shannon and just asked if Toby could just join us for a quick session. And she did, and Toby came right in, and the student was so receptive to the lesson.”

“He kind of gets very excited when he comes in my office, because he has a basket of goodies, and so Toby was kind of displaying some excitement about those, and then he calmed down. And so we were able to just correlate that lesson of behavior that Toby was displaying with the behaviors that the student was displaying.”

Now, after turning two in December, he’s a fully registered service dog who can fly on planes, been awarded a Good Canine Citizen certificate and recently earned his American Alliance of Service Dogs Certification. Newsome hopes to eventually get him out to the carpool line, but in the meantime, he’ll continue to focus on honing his thespian capabilities.

Avery says that while he’s had a big paw in lifting students’ moods, his reach goes even further than that.

“So for me and my own mental health, he has been such a comfort to just know that that’s there, and I think that that’s that that’s for everybody, not just our students but our employees as well.”