A look at W.T. Clarke High School's new Dog Rescue Club

More than 50 animal lovers gathered in the cafeteria of W.T. Clarke High School last February for the first meeting of the school’s Dog Rescue Club. They shared ideas and plans to visit and help out at local shelters and other rescue organizations. But the coronavirus pandemic extinguished those plans, and their excitement, when schools closed the following month.

Now, almost a year later, the club is active once more. While in-person extracurricular activities still aren’t allowed in the East Meadow School District, the Dog Rescue Club has met on Zoom and even hosted its first community event.

In December, members partnered with the school’s Key Club to hold a joint canned-food and pet-supplies drive. “We wanted to do something that everyone could participate in,” Dog Rescue Club founder Ella Noonan said. “We’re really happy with how generous everybody was. We had such a great turnout.”

Club members set up two giant donation boxes outside the school’s main office, and within two weeks they were overflowing with goods. Club officers delivered two contractor bags full of supplies to Levittown’s Second Chance Animal Rescue, another bag to Wantagh’s Last Hope Animal Rescue and a bag of canned food to LI Helpers. Founded by W.T. Clarke High School alumna Misha Khan, LI Helpers is a youth-led nonprofit that distributes food to local families in need.

Noonan, a junior at Clarke, started the club last year, and asked her class adviser, English teacher Holly Judge, to serve as adviser of the new club as well. “I know she’s the kind of person who loves dogs,” Noonan said, “so I thought she’d be the best adviser.”

“When Ella came and asked me, I couldn’t say no,” Judge said. “I love dogs. And she’s such a hard worker, so I knew that she meant business.”

When schools closed last spring, the club was put on hold for the remainder of the year. But once students were back in school, Noonan reconnected with Judge and began thinking of ways to continue the club’s efforts.

“We’re getting our feet wet,” Judge said. “Ultimately, our goal is to get involved in events throughout the community. But now we’re doing what we can with what we have.”

Judge contacted the school’s Key Club, a student service club that works with East Meadow Kiwanis, and the officers of the two groups met on Zoom to coordinate their food and supplies drive.

Members dropped off the supplies they collected at the end of December, and Noonan got a brief tour of Last Hope Animal Rescue. “It was really nice getting to meet everybody there,” she said. “I even got to meet some of the other animals and talk to the director there about what they do.”

“Ella and this club inspired me to adopt my own dog,” Judge said. Over the summer, she adopted an American pit bull terrier-Siberian husky mix named Pebbles from Ruff House Rescue in Island Park.

Looking ahead, Noonan and Judge want to enlist guest speakers from animal rescues and shelters to talk to members about adopting and how to properly care for animals. After the pandemic, they hope to take field trips to shelters with the whole club. “We want to make it as interactive as possible,” Noonan said.