Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.

Our purpose at this moment is to honor a great lady for great accomplishments. I have one other purpose tonight: to pause to notice that, because of this lady and others like her, we are at a turning point. At this moment, we are at the exact midpoint between a happy future and a sad past.

I'm not going to dwell on the sad past right now. I'm focused on that happy future. In fact, I feel some time travel coming on. Travel with me about twenty years to the year 2015. Thanks to the Internet, the whole world is speaking English now.

My knees are now 67 years old and creaky, but they're good enough for a walk around the campus of the Forman School in Litchfield, Connecticut. The Headmaster invites me in to see pictures of the new Forman School in Sacramento; the 75^th affiliate in the nationwide group that got started almost 20 years ago, around the year 1995 or '96, if I remember right. That's not counting the experimental branches in London, Dubai, and Tokyo.

The new Dean of the Faculty joins us and senses that my memory isn't what it used to be. So she reminds me that Forman's role as the lab school for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill - back in the old days - turned into an international Parent and Teacher Institute about five years ago. The core of the Institute's program is to identify learning difficulties practically at birth, and to teach parents and teachers to overwhelm the problem before it ever gets started - by doing a thousand hours of interactive reading, a thousand hours of interactive question-asking, and a thousand hours of Sesame Street before a child ever goes to school.

The Headmaster and Dean have meetings to go to, so I start wandering the halls. I pass a TV set playing something like an MTV video that is also about how numbers work. In class after class, I see children with all their senses engaged - seeing, hearing, touching, singing - acting out roles, building things. There is passion in their eyes, confidence in their bearing. Children learning - and loving the experience. And I stop for a minute to read three bronze plaques on the wall of the main foyer:

In Honor of Bill Gates
For Developing
The Worldwide Interactive Education Net
September 2010

In Honor of Steven Spielberg
For Donating to the Johnson Art Center
A Program of
Electronic & Holographic Arts
June 2002

In Honor of Charles Schwab
For funding
The development and distribution
Of Every Parent's LD Diagnostic Kit
March 1996

I stop by the library - actually it's now a computerized multimedia retrieval system with books, magazines, videos, CD-ROM's, holographic display modules, virtual reality modules and a few other gadgets I don't even know the names of. They're all about learning: how to learn, when to learn, what to learn. I pop an all-purpose smart card into a slot in a machine, and get a report on the public schools in the US:

• 70% of children with learning difficulties are now identified before their schooling starts - a total reversal of the sad old days of 1995, when 60% reached adulthood still undiagnosed and untrained.
• 8% of kids with learning difficulties are still dropping out of high school - but that's better than the 35% of 15 to 20 years ago.
• Testing of juvenile delinquents shows that 20% have learning difficulties. But ten years ago, we estimated the number to be 50%. And today, at least, we know who the 20% are. We still can't help them all, of course, thanks to the taxpayer revolt back at the end of the 20^th century. Our public schools have been underfunded and overextended ever since.
• 27% of kids under treatment for drug abuse are still LD. The number used to be 60%.

I can't take any more of these numbers. My knees hurt when I started this walk, and now my head hurts. And these kids are wearing me out - look at them all with their funny hairdos, running around the campus, going every which way:

• to the Johnson Art Center
• to the Joe Fatalori Science Building
• to the Peter Philips Humanities Center
• to the Diane Kessenich Professional Skills Building

Vital kids preparing for a vital future. Ah, if it weren't for my knees - and if I only had it to do over again.

I find myself slipping back down the slope from the future, slipping back past 2000, past 1998, past a delightful evening in October 1995 at the Waldorf Astoria, past 1988, past 1978, past 1968, all the way back to 1958. I see a small boy in a church, singing at the top of his lungs with all the enthusiasm and gusto of the hopelessly innocent. I hear him bellow out the first hymn: "Praise Dog for whom all blessings-" And he sang others:

• A Mighty Fortress is our Dog
• The Crutch's One Foundation
• Pears to the Lord

By the end of the service, even I know that the laughter is about me, and I close the hymnal, and I do not open it again for years. Even today, every time I read a report or a letter, every time I do the numbers, every time I look at a graph, and especially when I'm doing what I'm doing right now - I still freeze a little. The sound of laughter hasn't completely gone away. That's what it's like for someone who has succeeded with learning difficulties.

Eventually, I struggled through a process of liberation more or less on my own. I saw the problem I had, I accepted that I had it, I leaned on a few people - some of them are here tonight - who helped me cope with it. And I compensated for it with years' and years' worth of memory exercises, computers, and gadgets. And I have achieved a certain success, not in solving the problem, but in managing it.

Today, I have a career that I enjoy and am proud of. I did it the old-fashioned way. I did it without the benefit of the Forman School. But the old-fashioned way is not the better way.

It should not have cost me what it did. And it should not be costing so many like me such huge sums of shame, such huge sums of frustration, and such huge sums of anger and resentment that many of them eventually are forced into emotional and spiritual and financial bankruptcy. The old way was much too expensive, both to the individuals who suffered through it and to the society which lost their brilliance.

Well, the past is the past. There is a better way, and it is already taking shape at the exact midpoint between that future I visited a moment ago and the past that I an now leaving behind. We are at the dead center moment between those two times right now, right here, tonight. This dead center moment is when we pause to notice what is going on now to build the bridge that lets us progress from that kind of past to that kind of future. We notice it and honor it - honor it and decide to participate in it.

There is the moment, and there is the person of the moment. John Forman moved us from here to here, and Diane Kessenich has moved us from here to here. That's what makes her the person of this moment. Here's what Diane has done. First, the small things under her management:

• Board meetings went from chaos to masterpieces of control and focus.

We focused on a huge range of things which she didn't necessarily think of all by herself, but, by God, she's the one who got us to do them.

• Built new dorms
• Upgraded the academic buildings
• Raised teachers' salaries and benefits
• Started learning how to raise funds skillfully
• Started to focus on diversity - racial and cultural
• Endowed scholarships and chairs
• And finished building the art center

Through all of this, we continue to be what we always were - a collection of people with great values and great instincts. But because of Diane Kessenich we have gone from being the seed to being the tree, complete with roots and branches. We have become a real school. So much for the small things we did under Diane's management. Now here are the big things we've been doing under her leadership:

• She got us to say that we are first and foremost, and no bones about it, out loud and for real, a school for kids with learning difficulties and learning disabilities. Period, new sentence.
• She's gotten us to be the cutting edge school for kids with LD, a place where the theories get tested, where techniques get born, where what works gets perfected, and where what doesn't work gets tossed out.
• Above all, she believed we could be more than we thought we were. And she got us to act on it.

You see, we had been keeping our expectations low in order to keep our disappointments low. Diane Kessenich raised our expectations and with them she raised our level of vision, effort and accomplishment. All this from the woman who, just five years ago, was heard to say, "I'm just Diane, and I just write kids' books." Because of her, I can stand here tonight and not feel in the least bit foolish when I ask a few questions, like:

• Who here knows Bill Gates? Or knows someone who knows him? Or knows someone who knows someone who knows him? Get an appointment with Bill Gates for Tom Kendall, one of our trustees, by the end of 1995. We have to talk with Mr. Gates about a plaque.
• Who here knows Steven Spielberg? Or knows someone who knows him? Or knows someone who knows someone who knows him? Get an appointment with Mr. Spielberg for Seward Johnson, another of our trustees, by the end of 1995. There's another plaque to talk about.
• Who here knows Charles Schwab? Or knows someone who knows him? Or knows someone who knows someone who knows him?

Funny I should mention him. Marlene Spalten, Forman's Director of Development, sent me an article about Charles Schwab - about his dyslexia, about his struggle to succeed despite it, and about the foundation for LD children he started with his wife. I mentioned it to a friend of mine, and my friend happens to know Schwab's wife. So I wrote a letter to Schwab that I handed to my friend, who handed it to Schwab's wife, who thrust it under Charles's nose, and guess what? I heard from Charles Schwab and his foundation people, and Schwab knows Mel Levine, who has developed a great teaching process for LD students, and Schwab is backing Levine's work.

Well, it so happens that Mel Levine is the person down in North Carolina to whom Forman sent six people to learn the teaching process. And that was made possible through a very generous donation by George Baker. And now Charles Schwab wants to get together with me and - who knows? Maybe there's another plaque to talk about.

Maybe we can get powerful people together with the people who are doing wonderful work in this field, and leverage all those resources and build a national program that finally gives hope to the 15% of our population who have learning difficulties. People know people who know people.

• Who here knows a chief executive of a public-minded company? Make an appointment for our Trustee Bill Olsen to see him or her about creating on-the-job programs for employees with LD.
• Who here knows people of influence in advertising and the media? Do you have any idea how much good it would do to create a public service campaign that just makes people aware of learning differences and what it costs us not to deal with them?
• And who here know s how to write a good letter? Get an appointment for yourself with Marlene Spalten, and let's get going on the next phase of fund-raising.

By the way, do any of you golfers out there have a single-digit handicap? Schwab invited me to play golf. He's a five. I don't discuss my handicap in polite company. Maybe I should get someone to fill in for me, so we don't kill this opportunity on the first hole. Just kidding. I think I can handle this one. If Diane Kessenich, who just writes children's books, can build the Forman School to what it is today, I guess I can stick my neck out a little bit. And so can all of us.

To paraphrase Abe Lincoln when he met Harriet Beecher Stowe, "Diane, you are the little woman who gave us this great big vision." We can see the possibilities tonight for the year 2015 because we can go into that future on the wings we have borrowed from you. And so, it gives me enormous pleasure and pride to present you with the John N. Forman Award:

"See Me Fly"

Take a look into your heart
Take a look you'll see me
I'm the child who needs
an extra loving hand to be free
See me jump so high
See me try and try
Lend your hand and some day
all alone I will fly
There's a treasure, there's a key
in this loving family
In the books, the friends
the time I spend
just being me
I'm going through that open door
and take a higher road
I'm going to ring the highest bell
I'm going to carry my load