Sally Smith, 78; Lab School Founder

"It helps that I'm a little hyperactive," she told The Post.

"She had a wicked sense of humor," said Garry Clifford, a former Lab School board member and parent. Mrs. Smith loved it that the obscene graffiti in the school's bathrooms was always misspelled.

Clifford, like many other parents, recalled the relief she felt once her troubled little boy -- now 40 and a successful union organizer -- began to thrive at the Lab School. "I had my kid back," she said.

Today, the Lab School has 323 day students ages 5 to 19, a tutoring program that reaches an additional 250 children and adults, a summer camp, a night school and a testing service. A second campus opened in Baltimore in 2000, and a school using the Sally Smith methodology opened in Philadelphia last year.

Most students spend four to five years at the Lab School, almost all graduate from high school and about 90 percent go on to college.

Sally Liberman Smith was a native of New York City, one of four daughters born to Isaac and Bertha Liberman. Her father was president of Arnold Constable and Co., an old-line New York department store, and a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt's.

Mrs. Smith graduated in 1950 from Bennington College, where she studied modern dance with Martha Graham. She also studied with the renowned psychoanalyst and author Erich Fromm, who was so impressed with her senior thesis that he helped her get it published. The book was "A Child's Guide to the Parent's Mind" (1951).

After receiving a master's degree in education from New York University in 1955, Mrs. Smith worked briefly for the World Health Organization in Paris before moving to Geneva with her husband, who was in the Foreign Service. She also published her second book, "Nobody Said It's Easy: Can the Years Between 13 and 19 Be the Best Years of a Child's Life?"

In 1976, she became a professor in the School of Education at American University, where she ran the master's degree program specializing in learning disabilities. The Lab School is the primary training site for most of the graduate students in the program.

She was the author of 10 books, including "Succeeding Against the Odds: Helping the Learning Disabled Realize Their Promise" (1993) and "The Power of the Arts: Creative Strategies for Teaching Exceptional Learners" (2001).

In "No Easy Answers: The Learning Disabled Child at Home and at School" (1995), she wrote that teachers should not be looking for "cures" for a child's learning disability. Instead, "each teacher must be a detective of sorts to determine how each child learns best, what modalities or channels of learning are a child's strongest ones, what interests can be built on, what specific disabilities are there to remediate."

PBS produced four films in 2002 demonstrating the teacher training techniques that Mrs. Smith pioneered. She ran workshops all over the world.

Her marriage to Robert Smith ended in divorce.

In addition to Randall Smith of New Orleans and Gary Smith of the District, survivors include a third son, Nick Smith of Olney; a sister; and one granddaughter.