Friday photo of G. Wallace & T. Zirpoli

Would you like to have been at their table for lunch?

In the first week of February 2026, two eminent special educators met for lunch. Tom Zirpoli drove from his home in Maryland to connect and have a meal with Gerry Wallace in Northern Virginia. Now, wouldn’t it be fantastic to sit back and listen to these two people chat about their memories, the ideas that animate them these days, and whatever friends talk about when they haven’t seen each other in decades?

Tom Zirpoli and Gerry Wallace in a selfie from February 2026. Photo © 2026 by Thomas Zirpoli, Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

Gerry Wallace, who is a native of Connecticut, has had a career that spanned more than 60 years and provided him with a front row seat as the area of learning disabilities grew from infancy to childhood and now maturity. Gerry didn’t just sit back and watch it all happen; he stirred the pot. After completing undergraduate studies at Central Connecticut State College, he studied remedial reading at the Univeristy of Arizona, taught school in California, and then completed doctoral studies at the University of Oregon. A year later he joined the faculty at the University of Virginia, where he was a fixture for something like 20 years (we were pals on that faculty the ~15 years that our stints at UVA overlapped). For a while, Gerry left academia and worked with Pro-Ed in publishing educational products, but he returned to join the faculty at George Mason University, spending the last ~20 years there before retiring. Along the way, Gerry wrote a whole passel of books, founded and edited the journal Intervention in School and Clinic, led major learning disabilities organizations, and taught a uncounted number of doctoral students who went on the be outstanding teacher educators and researchers in special education.

Tom Zirpoli is one of the people whom Gerry influenced during Tom’s doctoral studies at UVA. Tom arrived at UVA after completing undergraduate and masters work at Old Dominion University. Although much of his doctoral studies focused on individuals with severe disabilities, Tom also learned about applications with students with other disabilities as well. When he finished his degree, he stayed at UVA for a couple of years to coordinate a special program that provided advanced training for a couple of dozen special educators from Indonesia. Then he took a faculty position at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul (MN, US) before moving to McDaniel College in Maryland. Like Gerry, Tom published influential text books, especially on behavior and classroom management. Probably his most important work, however, was the leadership of a nonprofit corporation—Target Community & Educational Services— that has provided educational, medical, residential, and vocational services for 100s (no exaggeration) of children and adults with developmental and other disabilities and also provides internship opportunities for college students preparing to be human service providers. Interested readers can learn more from the bio page about Tom at McDaniel.

I’m really honored that I had multiple opportunities to work with both of these special special educators. As I hope the foregoing paragraphs indicate, they are done a lot for our kids, parents, and their teachers. What is more, they are both good guys (just imagine them in 10-galloon white hats), What is more, these days both these two gentlemen actually hang around here at Special Education Today. If you, Dear Readers, are vigilant, you’ll see Gerry and Tom drop comments every now and again.