Students at College Heights Secondary School are working together to send 50 much-needed dog houses up north before winter.
They’re learning about teamwork, using skills that will serve them in real-life work experiences and are getting involved in something that will have an impact well beyond the classroom.
The construction students, Grades 9 to 12, are building dog houses that will become life-saving shelters for dogs in a northern Ontario First Nations community.
“These are free-roam dogs,” explained Janice Hannah, senior education and research specialist at International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) and manager of the Northern Dogs Project.
Free-roam dogs are not wild and they’re not strays. They have owners, however they spend their days and nights outside not confined by leashes or fences.
However, in the harsh winter months, food becomes scarce and finding shelter can be a matter of life or death.
For the second year in a row, College Heights construction students are now building the houses in just three to four weeks. The houses will ship north by mid-December, so they can be utilized by the northern Ontario community right away.
The community has around 275 dogs. The dog houses are expected to be finished within the next few weeks. They will then be loaded onto a truck and driven up north to the First Nations community.
