Lu Zeph
In many ways, Lu Zeph’s office is like any other on campus — a maze of books, grant paperwork, and research articles. But there’s one other hazard: if you’re not careful, you might bump your head on a sculpture of a flying moose, suspended from the ceiling.
Why the sculpture? Well, most of what Zeph has accomplished in her long and storied career — first as a teacher, later as leader of UMaine’s graduate program in severe disabilities, and today as director of the Center for Community Inclusion and Disability Studies (CCIDS) — were the types of things that were only supposed to happen when moose could fly.
But Zeph has been making the impossible possible for more than three decades.
When Zeph started her career in the early 1970s, children with severe disabilities were either segregated or forgotten when it came to education. Many were placed in institutions or nursing homes. The general assumption was they couldn’t learn, so why bother? Others were sent to special schools for a “separate but equal” learning experience.
But neither of these options sat well with Zeph.
“The education of children with severe disabilities is even more critical, because it affects their whole quality of life,” says Zeph. “What these kids mostly needed was what other children already had — the opportunity to learn.”
For nearly four decades — first as a teacher and early interventionist, later as a UMaine professor, and today as a leading authority on inclusive education and public policy for those with developmental disabilities — Zeph has been fighting to give children of all abilities just that: the opportunity to learn.
To say that Zeph has been involved with nearly every major advance in education for students with severe disabilities would not be an overstatement. She has advised Congress on landmark legislation. She has served in leadership roles in national associations. She was a sounding board for mainstreaming in Maine schools. In 1999, she was awarded a prestigious Kennedy Public Policy Fellowship in Washington, D.C. She was later called back to Washington for a year to serve as executive director of the Joseph S. Kennedy Jr. Foundation.
At UMaine, she developed the master’s specializations in severe disabilities and early intervention, and coordinated the undergraduate and graduate interdisciplinary concentrations in developmental disabilities that evolved into the interdisciplinary concentrations in disability studies. She continues to be the driving force behind CCIDS, which has brought in more than $50 million in grants since 1992.
“The field of severe disabilities and I grew up together, and at each point where it needed to evolve, my thinking was typically way ahead of where things were,” says Zeph, who joined the education faculty at UMaine in 1979 as coordinator of graduate study in severe disabilities. “I had a reputation, both in the state and nationally, for pushing the envelope and wanting more, expecting more and trying to create more. For each of the things I have done over the years, that has been the story.”
