And Friday morning, Bryant got to meet a puppy named Penalty Kick, who found her hearing aid on the playground at Paul Munro Elementary School.

As Bryant, a first-grader, played on the school jungle gym Feb. 10, her hearing aid - a $2,000 piece of high-tech equipment - fell out.

Classmates and teachers fanned out across the playground searching through the gravel for the tiny flesh-colored hearing aid. It is about the size of a pencil eraser.

The school day ended, the students went home and Lynn Betts, Lynchburg City School’s teacher of the hearing impaired, continued the search.

“It was very important that we find that hearing aid that same day,” Betts explained. Contact with water could ruin or seriously damage it, and snow was in the weekend forecast.

As she searched through the gravel for the hearing aid she had placed in Bryant’s ear earlier that morning, she saw Sally and Davis von Oesen walking by with their three dogs.

They live just down the street from Paul Munro.

Betts asked them to keep an eye out for the hearing aid.

Davis had a better idea, though - finding it.

Penalty Kick, an energetic curly-coated retriever, also known as PK, took a quick sniff and taste of Betts’ hands, leapt onto the playground and began sniffing.

After digging around beneath the slide, the puppy trotted over to Betts.

Betts put her hand out and PK dropped a portion of the hearing aid into her hand.

Moments later a mother and daughter on their evening walk passed Betts and offered to help look for the last piece of the hearing aid - a tiny transmitter. Friday morning, Stephanie Bryant, the daughter of Forrest and Frances Bryant, and her classmates met PK and von Oesen to say “thank you.”

As a dozen tiny first-grader hands swept through PK’s short black curls, von Oesen told the students that PK is kind of like a lab, and that curly coated retrievers were once used to find birds.

Then Stephanie, shy and a bit afraid to get too close to PK, gave von Oesen a card with a picture of a black dog she had colored on the front.

And as a thank you to PK, there was a bone, a squeak toy and a whole lot of affection from Bryant’s classmates.

Amy Coutee
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