High school students work hard to build hundreds of new homes, makes the perfect gift for shelter dogs and cats in need

For the last fourteen years, high school shop teacher Barry Stewart from the Career Center in North Carolina has developed an easy, effective project for his students.
Stewart has his students design and build hundreds of houses for dogs and feral cats. Stewart’s students not only learn a valuable trade, but they also get an education in compassion as well.
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Barry Stewart Photo
All the houses made by the kids are donated to pet shelters and needy families. Sometimes, people don’t realize that even though their pet has a fur coat icy winters or hot summers can make it miserable or even take its life. The houses provide shelter from the elements.
The problem of unwanted animals is a terrible problem in the United States. Although it’s impossible to know for sure how many stray dogs and cats there are, estimates on cats alone say as many as 70 million.
There are approximately 7.6 million pets entering animal shelters across the nation every year. Homeless animals outnumber homeless people 5 to 1.
Barry Stewart Photo
Stewart’s program that builds and delivers animal houses came out of a chance encounter in 2002. At the time, he ran across Forsyth County Animal Control’s Houses for Hounds program, which coordinates with multiple animal welfare groups to provide free dog houses to lower income residents in the area.
Stewart knew that the framing technique and terminology for building a pet house parallels that of building a home for people. He told PEOPLE Magazine, “The floor system, wall system, roof system and all the actual parts are identical. So, every part we use on the pet houses we can reference to the correlating part in the home. I realized that it would be easy enough to work into what we were doing in the classroom. It was a good fit.”
Adding feeding stations to their building repertoire has increased the number of structures the students have built over the years, including over 600 dog houses and 110 feral cat houses. These have all been donated to shelters, rescues, and families.
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Stewart's student, ninth grader Nicholas Talley, finds the project very rewarding. “I thought it was pretty cool,” Talley said. “I have a dog also and I know not all dogs get shelter. It feels good to build a house for a dog that doesn’t have shelter and to give back in a way.” Before Talley’s family adopted her, his own dog, Bella—a boxer rescued from a fighting ring—was a canine companion for a woman battling cancer, so Talley knows all about compassion!