During lunch periods on May 3, students gathered in the sunny courtyard to attend the first ever LT stress management day. A team of “stress busters” welcomed students with live music, bubble wrap and a comfort dog. Most students spent their time petting Angel, the comfort dog, to take stress away caused by studying for AP tests and upcoming finals.

“I think LT was missing out on something,” Gaby Monte ’18 said. “I was stressed and so were the students around me.”

LT counselor Maria Boyle created a team of “stress busters” for the first time this year. She chose students to discuss stress at LT and how it can be managed by students. In these discussions August Domanchuck ‘17 brought up the idea of a stress buster day. Included in the conversation was bringing a comfort dog, commonly used on high school and college campuses to help students cope with stress.

“It’s small, but so powerful,” Domanchuck said. He said that small things could be done to improve students’ levels of stress. “It’s the little things that matter.”

During one of the stress-busters weekly meetings, Emily Flores ‘17 decided to contact her church which participates in a comfort dog program. The church brought their comfort dog Angel in to help students during AP testing. The trained dog is taken care of by volunteers in the church who bring her to locations in need of emotional support. She visits places where natural disasters and tragedies have taken place, along with simple visits to patients in hospitals. After a student who attended Cossitt Elementary died earlier this year, Angel visited to help the students. Comfort dogs are able to help those who are stressed, so taking her to school during AP exams made sense to the stress-busters team.

“It was really nice to have this opportunity because it makes me smile and think about something besides school for a minute,” Makaela Faldani ‘18 said.

Boyle asked her students to look at the different aspects of stress to discover the best way to manage stress. This was the school’s first anti-stress day and they hope to have more in the future, to help students cope with school stressors. The music and comfort dogs put smiles on students faces and allowed them to de-stress for a day.

“Our goal was to help students analyze stress to be able to manage it better,” Boyle said.