Holliston’s Extended Day’s OKO Program
Holliston’s Extended Day’s OKO program is a summer camp that gathers students from the Placentino and Miller schools and provides extra curricular activities. This past Tuesday, OKO had a Community Workers information session showing off ambulances, police cars, fire trucks, and army trucks. Workers on the force were also there to give information about the vehicles and their functions to the kids and let them go in the vehicles and see what it’s like.
The police officers showed their cars and some of the equipment a police officer carries. The EMT’s showed an ambulance and all the equipment inside of it. Fire Fighters showed their fire truck, the equipment for shooting water and had a fire suit for kids to try on. The army brought in an army truck for kids to go into and look at.
There were also kids with papers asking for autographs from each of the workers. Some of the kids even came up to me and asked for my autograph, which I wasn’t expecting. The ambulance had to leave early however because they were called to an emergency situation.
After the kids checked out the vehicles, the Chief of Police, Matthew Stone, gathered all the kids to show them a K-9 police dog. The kids were told to not move around a lot or make a lot of noise so they don’t startle the dog and make him act aggressively. The dog’s name is Cesh and Matthew trains and takes care of Cesh. Cesh is a Dutch Shepard whose parents were also police dogs. Cesh is very well trained. He listens to everything Matthew tells him to do and can find things through smell extremely well. An example Matthew used was that he asked the kids if they knew how pizza smelled and that Cesh could smell each of the individual ingredients of that pizza. Cesh also wears a harness so other officers can pick him up if Cesh can’t reach something because it is too high. While he is very well trained, it seems to be a rather simple way of training. If Cesh is told something, such as sit and does, he is given a treat, if he is given something to track and he finds it, he is given a treat, so on and so forth. It was a very informative day for the kids and as the vehicles left, they all blew their horns. Extended Day would like to thank Holliston Police, Fire, and EMTs and the U.S. Army National Guard for taking the time to visit. Special thanks to OKO teacher Tracey Carlin Holmes for setting up such an exciting event.