| Golden Rule adding new toddler care program |
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Rosa Jackson gives a literacy lesson to pre-school children at Golden Rule Child Care, which is located in Grace Lutheran Church in Andover. Photo by Eric Hagen
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The Golden Rule Child Care Center at Grace Lutheran Church in Andover
is now offering to watch over toddlers ages 16 to 32 months old.
| Service dog and girl, 17, are reunited |
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| Wednesday, 09 April 2008 | ||
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by Sue Austreng Staff writer Inside the Dickinsons’ Coon Rapids home Monday afternoon, Chandra and Jasmine hugged and held each other close. It was a reunion of the family sort, only the players were not all of the human variety. Chandra Dickinson, a senior at Blaine High School, has muscular dystrophy, and Jasmine is her service dog, an 80-pound greyhound/Irish deerhound mix. Melissa is Chandra’s mom and Jackie and Chubbs are a cocker spaniel dog and a domestic short-haired cat, respectively. After Jasmine went missing the evening of March 31, the Dickinsons – mother and teenaged daughter, as well as the canine and feline members of the family – spent their days and nights in fear and wonder, anxious to find Jasmine and frightened about what might have become of her. “It’s just so good to have her back. I was so afraid for her,” Chandra said, her arms wrapped around her servant and friend, Jasmine. Jasmine had only been placed with Chandra one week before she went missing, but already the Dickinsons and the service dog had formed a close family relationship. For Chandra, whose muscular dystrophy has her struggling with balance and using a walker, Jasmine retrieves items, pushes handicap-accessible doors open, fetches the emergency phone, opens the refrigerator door and can help Chandra get up if she falls. The happy reunion between Chandra and her almost-two-year-old service dog came some 84 hours after Jasmine went missing March 31 from the family’s home on the 11800 block of Kumquat Street N.W. 
It seems Jasmine followed Jackie out the door to the fenced-in backyard.“I called her and she came running. Then she turned and ran away,” Chandra said. “I think she thought it was a game.” But the canine fun and games turned to lost-and-found when Jasmine ducked through a three-foot hole in the fence. With snow falling and the wind howling, she became disoriented and couldn’t hear Chandra and Melissa calling for her. The Dickinsons immediately telephoned Hearing and Service Dogs of Minnesota, the organization that had trained Jasmine and placed her with Chandra. A call was made to the Coon Rapids Police Department and the Blaine Police Department was also put on alert. Fliers were posted around the neighborhood and when ABC Newspapers learned of the missing dog caper, a breaking news item was immediately posted on www.abcnewspapers.com. “We were getting so many calls,” Melissa said. “People would see her out in the yard, nose to nose with another dog or feeding at the bird feeders and deer feeders. They tried to call her, to get her to come to them. She loves people, but something must have scared her, because she would just run.” The family and their neighbors, police officers and Hearing and Service Dogs of Minnesota personnel surmise, based on Jasmine’s whereabouts when people reported seeing her, that from Kumquat Street she followed Sand Creek and then wandered over to Bunker Hills Regional Park before heading east to the sod farms along Main Street. She was finally captured when she wandered into a live trap placed near a deer feeder on 130th Circle in Coon Rapids. Upon her return to the Hearing and Service Dogs of Minnesota, Executive Director Al Peters said that Jasmine was examined at the University of Minnesota Veterinary Hospital. Jasmine had some injuries, he said, noting that “her paws were pretty torn up” and she had a couple of puncture wounds. Not only that, Jasmine lost eight pounds from her already-thin frame, but considering her four-day venture into the icy-cold yonder, she was in pretty good shape. “She was outside, day and night, for 84 hours, and she’s not an outside dog, so her injuries could have been much worse,” Peters said. The Dickinson family reunion won’t be complete until Jasmine has been medically cleared and carefully evaluated by Hearing and Service Dogs of Minnesota to determine whether she is emotionally ready to continue her service to Chandra. Chandra, currently a PSEO (post-secondary education option) student attending Anoka-Ramsey Community College, hopes to finish her liberal arts education there before transferring to the University of Minnesota to study psychology. Of course, Jasmine, her companion and faithful servant, will be at Chandra’s side throughout the journey. Sue Austreng is at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it . |
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