From the Washington Post, National Public Radio:

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.

… 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.

… 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.

… 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.”

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