By Joe Holley
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 4, 2007
Sally L. Smith, 78, founder of the Lab School in Washington, a school widely known for its innovative curriculum and its uncommon success in unlocking the mysteries of learning for those who learn differently from others, died Dec. 1 of complications of myeloma at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.
Mrs. Smith, a longtime resident of the District, started the school in 1967 when her youngest son, Gary, despite being bright and creative, could neither read nor understand simple math. As a first-grader at Beauvoir elementary school, Gary, in his frustration, began to act up at school, and Mrs. Smith and her husband discovered that he was severely learning disabled.
"I was told we either had to put him with the retarded kids, though he wasn't retarded, or with the disturbed kids, though he wasn't disturbed. The question was, where was the school that could take him?" she said in The Washington Post in 2000.
Relying on her observations and intuition, as well as her graduate school work in education, she came to understand that her son learned by acting things out and by telling stories rather than by absorbing lectures. She set out to create a school that relied on that insight.
"She did not intend to be in the school administration business," said another of her sons, Randall Smith. "She was just a concerned mother."
Mrs. Smith began with Gary and three other students in an annex of the Kingsbury Diagnostic Center, an education and testing program that had helped the Smiths determine the scope of their son's learning difficulties. She relied on artist friends as her teachers, enlisted other friends to raise or donate money and dreamed up the school's innovative curriculum in a few hours.
"She believed in people who were creative," said Randall Smith. "Her students would learn through dance, music, woodworking. They'd learn math by doing carpentry."
She also developed the "academic club" method, a nontraditional way for students to explore history, geography, civics and other subjects by relying on visual, hands-on, concrete activities. For example, Lab School students might experience the Italian Renaissance by becoming Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, copying their masterpieces and creating their own works of art.
In 1983, the rapidly growing Lab School moved into the former Florence Crittenden Home for Unwed Mothers on Reservoir Road NW, on a scenic hill above the Georgetown Reservoir.
Mrs. Smith also came up with a fundraising concept that proved successful. Since 1984, the school has hosted an annual dinner that features awards to famous people who happen to have learning disabilities. Honorees have included Cher, Tom Cruise and Harry Belafonte.
Randall Smith noted that students' self-esteem invariably improved when hearing stories from gala honorees such as Bruce Jenner, a former Olympic decathlete, who told them that he hated school and that children teased him because he couldn't read, or artist Robert Rauschenberg, who exclaimed, "Thank God I was different!"
Mrs. Smith also was unique. In both her life and her teaching, she favored vibrant colors, intensity and emotion. Her trademark fashion statements included polka-dot nail polish, eccentric jewelry and brightly colored dresses and scarves.
"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.