April,If you are receiving a paycheck or compensation from the museum, then OSHA regulations apply to your work, regardless of student status. For example, that means the museum needs to notify you if there are hazards within the collection and provide you with the necessary PPE and training to protect yourself. OSHA has nothing specific for service animals as far as I can tell. Keep in mind that hazards that can hurt humans are far more dangerous to smaller animals, like service dogs and especially corgis. I am not a lawyer, but I suspect that a reasonable accommodation would not include providing respirators to service animals. However, a reasonable accommodation would include ensuring that hazardous materials are not sitting out or actively being worked on when the service animal is present. For ethical and animal safety reasons (but not ADA legal reasons), I suspect that most employers dealing with historic artifacts or natural history specimens would be hesitant to let a person with a service animal be the sole employee in a collections setting. Regardless of whether or not a service animal is present, radioactive artifacts and pesticide-contaminated artifacts should not be outside of safe sealed storage, as OSHA would have kittens over unsafe storage or inadequate shielding (although they will accept administrative controls and mandatory PPE as an alternative to proper storage on an individual basis). With a service animal, you have to be certain that your future employers know what they are doing in terms of collections safety.To be sure that I am passing on the right information, I called my state's OSHA office to ask about regulations for service animal safety in the workplace, particularly in situations where employees must wear PPE. Nobody answered, but they have responded fairly quickly to previous calls, and I will pass on their response when they call me back. The DOJ has a toll-free information line for ADA rules that you can find on ada.gov; perhaps you should call them to ask about service animals and reasonable accommodations in areas where OSHA-mandated PPE has to be worn.Thank you,
Michael R.On Sat, Mar 25, 2017 at 11:41 PM, Legatt, April Mary <[log in to unmask]> wrote:Thank you all for your suggestions. I wasn't trying to be unclear in my post, it has been a stressful week. My service dog is trained in two primary tasks so far, pressure therapy for when a panic attack hits and alerting toor anxious behaviors. She is a corgi, so she is relatively small but she works perfect for my lifestyle and disability.I am a student; however, part of my degree includes working for the museum 20 hours a week. Hence I am technically a student and right now my accommodations are coming through the school rather an employer. Because of this, I didn't really want to give specifics that would put my school or employer in a specific light (good or bad) as they have never really dealt with this issue before. I'm was hoping to get more information so that I can find a job where the employer won't view me and my dog as a problem if there are was to successfully accommodate the situation.Thanks again for all your suggestionsApril legatt
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