SLD at ASL: Foundations to future

When Brian (ASL 1990–92) and Sue Lehmann P ’00 ’02 stopped by One Waverley Place in September for a trip down memory lane, their recollections of Brian’s two years spent co-founding ASL’s specific learning differences (SLD) program sparked a deep-dive into the program’s origins, evolution, present, and future! Read all about SLD’s humble beginnings, the ever-evolving array of services SLD is able to offer to learners, and all that students and families give back to continue building an incredible system of support.

The two-person team was unknowingly assembled at Chicago O’Hare in early 1990. 

Pam Dart, then ASL’s lower school principal, was flying through Chicago amid a flurry of US travel—and so Brian Lehmann, who was teaching elementary schoolers with learning differences in Iowa City at the time and had applied to work at ASL on something of a whim, made the three-and-a-half-hour drive east. His final interview was conducted at an O’Hare departure gate. 

A few hours later, Brian’s future collaborator, the late JoEllen Lang, touched down in Chicago from her home on Washington’s San Juan Island, interviewed with Pam at a different gate, and promptly flew back to the Pacific Northwest.

“We arrived in London on 1 August 1990. It was around 100ºF,” Brian recalls. He had moved across the pond with his wife, Sue, and their three young boys: Tim ’00, Todd ’02, and Peter, who was just a baby. They settled into a Maida Vale flat in a heatwave. “And then we started the program.”

When Brian and JoEllen met at ASL, where they had been hired to establish the School’s first specific learning differences (SLD) infrastructure through a lower school program, Brian was used to the red tape and tight budgets of US public schools. 

At the start of his ASL tenure, Brian asked Pam about program guidelines and budget, expecting something modest. “She goes, ‘However you want to design it. And basically: blank check.’ I said, ‘This is too good to be true,’” Brian laughs. “We could take the best of the structures from the US and continue them here at ASL. But at the same time, we had more openness and more flexibility, and that was wonderful.”

In just a two-year leave of absence from his Iowa school district, Brian built a lasting legacy at ASL. “We still hear from one particular family who felt that the program had a huge impact on their child; he’s been very successful,” says Brian. “We made a lot of progress establishing the program in a very short period of time. It was important to me that we get this off on the right foot.”

In September, Brian and Sue, who are now retired, visited ASL on a trip around the UK. It was their first time back at the School in 32 years, and they were thrilled to meet Yulisa Cruz, who teaches SLD students in the high school, and Belinda Nicholson, ASL’s director of student support services.

Stepping foot into the peaceful, sun-flooded Grade 3 classroom where he and JoEllen once taught—back then, the room was actually two rooms, divided by a wall down the middle—Brian was transported to early ’90s ASL, and reflected on how far the SLD program has come. 

Brian and Belinda agree that SLD—like everything—is a work in progress. Still, Brian muses, “Things started with two teachers in the lower school. To hear where it is now… It’s remarkable.”

Student Support Services (SSST), which Belinda has led since coming to ASL from New York in 2019, is an umbrella encompassing five teams: SLD is one of them, comprising 13 dedicated learning specialists across the lower, middle and high schools. An additional 11 staff members make up the four other SSST groups: educational psychologists, English as an additional language (EAL) teachers, K-12 counselors, and speech and language therapists. Taking school nurses and other stakeholders into account, Belinda’s team is about 30 strong.

When Brian and JoEllen founded the SLD program in the fall of 1990, they employed a “pull-out” model: students requiring individualized support would leave class in order to receive specialized instruction. Today, Belinda says, “We use a multi-tiered system of support,” with formal assessments and interventions beginning in Grade 2. “In kindergarten through Grade 1, we use our reading specialists and speech and language therapists quite fluidly; they do a lot of collaborative ‘push-in’ work as well. They’ll do small groups in the classroom, or they’ll pull students out.”

“Rather than ‘push-in’ or ‘pull-out,’” Belinda explains, “We think about the least restrictive environment, and how best to support a student. We try to think really broadly about the experience of a child.” 

In each division, that experience looks different. High school SLD teachers, for instance, “loop” with their students, meaning that an SLD student will work closely with the same adult for all four years of high school. Brian, a longtime champion of looping, is delighted to hear this. “We’re thinking about being able to do that in middle school as well,” Belinda says.

Nearly 35 years old, SLD continues to evolve. Belinda highlights the increasingly collaborative dynamic between classroom teachers and the student support team—a relationship that Brian worked hard to cultivate from the program’s start. 

“And thinking about 15 years ago—or frankly, even when I started at ASL six years ago,” Belinda says, “the comfort that people have around getting a diagnosis is changing.” She points to the student-founded Neurodiversity Club in the high school by way of example. “Being able to highlight that student voice and give them that advocacy has been really powerful.”

Lanier Ellison ’25 would agree. As a 2024-25 co-president of the Neurodiversity Club, she is deeply involved with student-led advocacy around learning differences and neurodiversity.

A soon-to-be “lifer” at ASL, Lanier has benefited from SLD support since she joined the School in Grade 1. “It’s been a huge part of my ASL experience,” Lanier says of the program. “Whenever I have an issue, I go to SLD first. It’s a system that’s checked up on me and made sure I’m getting the support I need.” 

She talks through her experience with the program—how, as a lower schooler, she was never quite clear on why she would be taken out of class, though she found the sessions helpful. “In lower school, it was mostly about reading and catching up on work. Everything went so fast, especially when I had fewer tools in my toolbox. Having a teacher who worked just with me and one other person with a learning difference like mine helped me be the best student I could.”

In middle school, Lanier remembers more conversation between grade levels—high school SLD students coming to speak to middle schoolers; Grade 8 students advising those in Grade 7. Still, “in middle school it was a different environment,” says Lanier. She remembers more shame and secrecy around SLD then—a persistent, if lessening, stigma that Belinda and her team work hard to combat.

In high school, Lanier found the Neurodiversity Club to be critical in chipping away at that stigma: “It helped me, when I was in Grade 9, to see older people embracing it. I wanted to be the same person who those seniors were for me; showing that it’s a nice environment, and a cool way to become friends with older kids.”

When Lanier was in Grade 10, the two beloved Neurodiversity Club co-presidents at the time steered the group toward more regular events engaging the ASL community. These include “table talks,” where lower and middle school SLD students and their parents—often worried about the future—sit down with older SLD students and teachers, to hear how they have navigated high school academics with learning differences.

“At the first table talk, there was a mom who had been super nervous,” Lanier recounts. “She was crying afterward, and said she had loved seeing us speak, and that it was so impactful. It helped her see her son’s learning in different ways.”

In recent years, the Neurodiversity Club has also held panel discussions at high school faculty meetings: “Every year, different kids in SLD go on the panel and talk about their experiences at school, and teachers talk back,” says Lanier. “It’s formed a new way for teachers to understand and deal with students with learning differences. Instead of someone talking about us, we come in and talk to teachers firsthand.” 

“It honestly is the most powerful faculty meeting that we have,” Belinda says.

The first time Lanier spoke on the panel, she was nervous. “But afterward, teachers would come up to me and say, ‘That was so amazing,’ and so many teachers emailed me. I felt like I was doing something important.”

“Something I think ASL does really well is working hard to pay attention to each student’s individual needs—and SLD is a great expression of that,” says a parent whose two children have thrived with SLD support. 

Speaking about her son, who accepted an offer to join SLD in Grade 9 after listening to the experiences of older students, she adds, “I think ASL recognized that he had a lot of potential, and wasn’t quite going to meet that potential unless he got extra help.” Her son now focuses on executive functioning skills, and benefits from a close relationship with an SLD teacher who will continue to serve as an advocate and liaison for his learning throughout high school.

“Neurodiverse children have a lot to offer: they can be more innovative thinkers, and can see things that other kids aren’t able to,” says this parent, who, with her husband, donated £100,000 to ASL last year, establishing an endowed fund for the SLD program. “I think it’s really important to keep children with neurodiversity in ASL, and not have them seek out other schools.” 

She hopes that other families whose children’s lives have been influenced by the work of the SLD program will be inspired to contribute as well, and help grow the endowment and support this critical work for years to come.

“The progress that has been made in both programming and resources is remarkable,” Brian wrote in an email after his visit to ASL, also expressing how much he enjoyed speaking with Belinda and Yulisa during his time at the School. 

Thanks to the brilliant, committed educators who have continued to shape and expand the SLD program since its 1990 founding, the students who have made it their own, and the families who have so generously supported it, SLD’s future at ASL is brighter than Brian could have dared hope on that far-too-hot day in August 1990 when he touched down in London and got the ball rolling.

Watch this short video to find out more about the support that our students currently receive: