LUBEC – He would be 30 years old now, but Columbia Falls resident Sally Thompson remembers him as the small child who led her to a career in special education.

It was 1979, and Thompson, an elementary school teacher who had left teaching a decade earlier to raise her children, agreed to fill in for several months for a teacher at the D.W. Merritt School in Addison.

“I had 33 second-graders, and in that class was a little boy who people said was hyperactive,” Thompson said. “I felt bad for him. It seemed to be out of his control.”

Thompson said she began letting the child walk and even run for a few minutes during reading group and encouraged him to jump rope in the doorway to the classroom.

The exercise helped the boy concentrate, and Thompson said she realized she’d found the work she was meant to do.

When the school year ended and SAD 37 Superintendent Richard Grant asked her to get certified in special education, Thompson agreed. She became the district’s first special education teacher, and in 1983, she received her master’s degree in special education from the University of Maine at Orono.

Now, 18 years later, Thompson has been chosen as Special Education Administrator of the Year by the Maine Administrators of Services for Children with Disabilities.

“The award is particularly important to me because it comes from my peers,” said Thompson, who is the SAD 19 special education director in Lubec.

The Machias native is the first Washington County teacher to receive the award. It is the latest in a long line of firsts for the woman who believes she has “a sixth sense” for the children she’s worked with over the years.

After leaving SAD 37, Thompson was the principal of Beals Elementary School, where she developed and taught the school’s first special education program.

She also developed Washington County’s first community-based work experience program and is now in the final stages of developing the first alternative education program for Lubec Consolidated School.

Thompson began working for the Lubec schools in 1997 and said she is proud of the positive attention her award brings to the school system and the children she serves.

“Lubec has been wonderful to me,” she said. “The school board is very supportive, and I really love the people there.”

Thompson has seen many changes in the field of special education over the last 18 years. Special education has evolved from what Thompson describes as a “we-take-everybody-Statue-of-Liberty syndrome” to a process of individually designed programs for children who have been identified as having a disability that adversely affects their educational performance.

“Some people think orthopedic problems that require a wheelchair qualify a child for special education, but that isn’t true,” she said. “The child must have a disability that interferes with their educational performance, and an orthopedic disability doesn’t affect that.”

Thompson said that before changes were made in special education laws, many children who had behavior disorders qualified for the program because they were classified as having an emotional disability. But that is no longer the case, she said

“If the behavior is willful, it is not a disability,” she said.

Thompson said there are many misconceptions about special education, including some people’s belief that children in the program are mentally retarded. Only 1 percent of children in special education fall into that category, she said.

The educator has developed many teaching tools for her students over the years and sometimes reaches back to her own childhood to come up with something that works. As a child, she loved to read, but had a hard time with spelling and had to make up little sayings to help her spell, she said.

“George Elmer’s old grandmother rode a pig home yesterday,” she recited. “That’s how I remembered to spell ‘geography.'”

The special education director plans to retire from full-time teaching at the end of this school year. She said it was quite a thrill to see her name on the roster of awards at the annual meeting of the Maine Coalition for Excellence in Education in Freeport on Dec. 7.

“I looked at it and saw the teacher, principal and superintendent of the year, and then there was my name,” she said. “It’s a nice way to wind down a career in education.”