11.2018 | THE SCIENTIST 49COURTESY OF SYDNEY SHEETS
nity to comment before it is added to the
Campus Administrative Manual, she says.
Several institutions have already pub-
lished new policies on having animals on
campus in the last several years, and many
more are on the w ay, says Novakofski. But
given the rare and diverse nature of the
requests to bring service dogs into the labo-
ratory, it’s “hard to come up with hard and
fast rules that are simple enough for every-
one to follow and still are acceptable legally,”
Earle reiterates. More important than con-
crete policies on service dogs in the lab, she
adds, are guidelines on what to consider
when making the decision and protocols for
making accommodations when appropriate.
In March, Redden and Christopher
Sweet at Cornell University’s Institute on
Employment and Disability published a
chapter in an ACS Symposium Series book
on admitting service dogs to chemistry
labs. And Ramp has put together a tem-
plate based on her experiences with Theo
and Sampson. (See infographic on page 47.)
At Parkland College, her efforts are already
making a difference, says Parkland’s Holm.
The campus has since made accommoda-
tions for service animals to accompany
their handlers to the gym and to a cadaver
lab, and there is currently a student with a
service dog taking the same intro chemis-
try lab that Ramp took with Theo. “Her pio-
neering—it’s paying o f f ,” Holm says.
A career in research may not be in the
cards for Ramp, though. While she awaits
the OCR’s decision, she is considering
her future. If she is unable to get IACUC
approval for her study, she will lose her
funding, and she will not have data to know
whether she can conduct the mouse exper-
iments s he ’d envisioned for her graduate
research. One back-up plan on the table is
attending law school. If science doesn’t work
out, Ramp hopes that a law degree could
allow her to help other individuals with ser-
vice dogs navigate the legal system, and to
change policies that discourage these peo-
ple from pursuing an education in STEM.
“When a barrier becomes immovable
then how do you maneuver around it?”
says Ramp. “Perhaps this could be the way
I could open doors for other scientists who
follow me.” gSERVICE DOG POSES HURDLES FOR PRE-VET STUDENT
Since she was four years old, Sydney Sheets has wanted to be a veterinarian. She
joined 4H when she was nine and began training and showing dogs. Beginning in fifth
grade, she volunteered at a local vet clinic, even scrubbing in for surgeries. And when
she started college in 2015, she chose Te x a s A&M University because of its renowned
veterinary medicine program.
But at age 16, Sheets learned she had type 1 diabetes. Rocked by the diagnosis,
she focused on something a nurse at the hospital had told her—she could get a ser-
vice dog. She found her puppy, a Belgian tervuren she named HALO, through a certified
breeder, and with the help of her dad and 4H leaders, trained him to alert her to danger-
ous swings in her blood sugar levels. By her sophomore year of college, Sheets didn’t go
anywhere without him.
Like Joey Ramp, Sheets is running into problems pursuing her dream job and the
education that would make it a reality with a service dog by her side. Both at Te x a s
A&M and at Tacoma Community College outside of Seattle, where she took classes
during the summer, HALO attended biology and chemistry labs with Sheets. He even
followed along to a course on reproduction in farm animals, which included palpating
a cow to check to see if it was pregnant. The professors, TAs, and administrators at the
school helped make the necessary accommodations to allow HALO to continue moni-
toring Sheets while she participated in such activities.
But when she enrolled in an animal science research class that involved field trips to
the Te x a s A&M’s horse, sheep, pig, and cattle facilities, the professor, Courtney Daigle,
told Sheets that HALO was not allowed. Sheets filed a complaint with the school, which
found that the professor had not been in compliance with the ADA, Sheets says. Still,
she withdrew from the class, later switched her major to sociology, and is now rethinking
her career direction. “[The incident] just kind of sucked a lot of the joy out of what I was
doing,” says Sheets, who is set to graduate in December 2019 and hopes to pursue a PhD
in psychology. The university could not confirm or deny the existence of the complaint or
the experiences of an individual student; Daigle did not respond to requests for comment
before deadline.
Sheets’s experience, like Ramp’s, illustrates the challenges of bringing a service dog
into the sciences. “It’s really discouraging,” says Sheets. “A lot of people are not going to
do STEM just because some battles aren’t necessarily worth fighting that hard.”
“For her to say I’m done [with veterinary medicine] was a little bit heartbreaking for
all of us,” says Sydney’s mom Karin Sheets, “because this has always been her dream.”