Sedona Police K-9 Sam and his handler, Officer Catherine Beers, visited Kelly Cadigan’s fourth-grade class at West Sedona School on Wednesday, April 23, to celebrate Sam’s upcoming third birthday and recognize the students’ fundraising during the “Minute That Matters” Special Olympics fundraiser. Trevor Turner’s fourth-grade class, which raised the second-highest amount during the fundraiser, joined the class for the second half of the visit.

“They are coming to our room because we raised the most money with the coins to give it to the Special Olympics so kids that are special needs can compete in sports,” student Isaac Joyeno Jimenez said.

“First I want to say ‘thank you,’ guys,” Beers told the class. “It’s the first time that we’ve ever done it here, since I’ve been in charge of the rev up for Special Olympics … and it’s over-surpassed any expectation that I ever had for it. So in comparison, your school collected over $1,300 between all the classes. You guys raised well over $300 yourselves, which is huge.” WSS exceeded its goal of raising $500 with the fundraiser.

Beers explained that she has been working with Sam for almost 18 months, primarily on public outreach and narcotics detection.

“All of our previous canine officers we had were apprehension dogs, which meant they were typically German shepherds and they were deployed after individuals who had committed a crime and they were bite dogs,” Beers said. “Sam doesn’t bite, that’s not his job. We deploy him on vehicles and houses.” She told the kids that she frequently rewards Sam for successfully completing a task by letting him play with a tennis ball, and that day he came across one in the classroom.

“Tennis balls are what he works for, but I’m going to take that from him,” Beers said. “If he gets a ball when he doesn’t work for it, then why would he work?” She then gave a demonstration of how they detect drugs and had the students pick a hiding place for her sample.

“What we use are training aids, and it is a synthetic material that they have made to smell like what that substance is … so it’s not unsafe for me to touch,” Beers said. “The reason that I put gloves on is because I don’t want to put my odor on this [canister] because … then he’s going to look for me.”

“The drugs he alerts on are heroin, cocaine, fentanyl, methamphetamines and ecstasy,” Beers said. “So those are what he finds for us, and he has found all of those here in Sedona. From January to January, he was deployed 58 times, and I probably deployed him, since January, maybe an additional 25 times. My goal for this year is to double the deployments [we] had last year because I was learning how to do my job.”

Sam’s third birthday was Monday, April 28, and the students celebrated by singing him “Happy Birthday” and presented Beers and Sam with handcrafted

birthday cards.

“I now that I can’t singin dog langwig but happy birthday now I am going to sing to you,” Jimenez wrote. “Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you.”