Faculty

Alan Pesky, Founder / Chair Emeritus, Lee Pesky Learning Center: The Lee Pesky Learning Center opened its doors in 1997, and it’s named for our son Lee, who passed away in 1995 from an inoperable brain tumor. And we had learning disabilities. When you have learning disabilities, you never lose them. And we decided that we wanted to establish something in Lee’s memory and that we wanted it to benefit children. Lee, as I said, had learning disabilities, and we thought it would be great to be able to help basically the 20% of the population that has some form of a learning disability.

Evelyn Johnson, Alan and Wendy Pesky, Profess of Special Education: Our mission statement here at the Lee Pesky Learning Center is to work together with students, families, and our community to understand and overcome obstacles to learning. And so we do that through a combination of services. At the heart of our Center are one-on-one services where we provide psycho-educational evaluations, academic intervention, counseling, and academic coaching to students of all ages who struggle with learning disabilities and attention challenges. So my field of study has been learning disabilities and in particular dyslexia. And when I heard of the opportunity, I was also looking for a new challenge at the University, and we were able to sort of negotiate a really unique and interesting partnership that initially was pretty much just defined by the fact that the ED also had a faculty line at the University.

Alan Pesky: We chose to endow a professorship at the College of Ed at Boise State University because of the relationship we have with the college and with the confidence that we have that the College of Education could be one of the really finest colleges of education in the country. My vision of the cocllaboration between Boise State’s College of Education and the Lee Pesky Learning Center is that I believe that the collaboration between the two institutions can create what could be one of the finest, if not the finest, institutions in this country addressing special education issues.

Evelyn Johnson: Providing great internship opportunities for people in our master’s in teaching and special ed and our master’s in education programs. Providing internships and research opportunities for doctoral students. We also have interns in the Social Work Department. And now, because we have this great partnership with students who, you know, are charged with reading the research and, you know, thinking through how the research applies to practice and coming up with new solutions, we’ve been able to have this group of students working on really reading and synthesizing the research as we develop the programs here.

Wendy Pesky, Co-Founder / Board Member, Lee Pesky Learning Center: I think that we found through the work that we have been doing with BSU that we have been able to enhance the program at BSU by giving teachers who are working at our Center a place to practice and do their clinical work, and I think this greatly enhances their experience.

Alan Pesky: I believe very, very strongly that every child who comes to the Lee Pesky Learning Center is the most important child that comes to the Lee Pesky Learning Center because when you’re dealing with the life of a child, you want to make sure that what you’re doing for that individual child is the best that that child can become. We believe that every child deserves the opportunity to fulfill their full potential in life, and that’s what the Lee Pesky Learning Center is all about.