Standing in the front of a crowded room, all eyes were on Lt. John Branson, a U.S. Marine recently returned from fighting in Afghanistan. Sitting on multi-colored gym mats inches away from him, 25 kindergartners and elementary school students visibly squirmed waiting for answers to their battery of questions.
"Are you like a ninja?" someone asked him. Branson smiled.
"I am like a ninja," he said.
"Did you miss your mom?" another wondered. He did.
"Do you march?" asked another. Not very well, Branson said. One of the last questions the students asked of Branson was what he wanted to be.
"I don’t know, right now I’m unemployed. Stay in school," Branson said with a laugh.
Branson met with the inquisitive children of The Diener School in Potomac on Friday, Dec. 12 for a ceremony in which they honored him for his service, but the event wasn’t just about Branson.
The second-year school, which operates out of Congregation Har Shalom on Falls Road, caters to students with wide-ranging learning, emotional, and developmental challenges but Branson’s visit is part of what school founder Jillian Copeland described as the character building part of the school’s curriculum. In addition to addressing the challenges that each of her 25 students face, Copeland strives to get them to look beyond themselves and to care for others in the world around them.
That was why Branson — a Potomac native who’s sister Kate teaches at Diener — came to the school to be presented with a plaque and a giant American flag made from construction paper, and it is also why the students sing songs in retirement homes on Valentine’s Day and volunteer in park cleanup programs on Earth Day. Copeland strives to help her children perform through the layered challenges, but she wants them to be good people too.
Sometimes parents of children with special needs "forget that they’re people, and for me that’s really, really important," Copeland said.

COPELAND is a teacher by training and a mother of four, but it wasn’t until she had her third child that she gained firsthand knowledge of learning and developmental delays. Unsatisfied with the schooling options that she was able to find for her son — even in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area which has no shortage of such programs — Diener eventually decided to start her own school.
"I couldn’t really find the appropriate learning environment for him," Copeland said. "I was really looking for a holistic, collaborative approach. There are a lot of great schools around, but nothing that really fit him."
Last year she had 11 students; this year there are 25 in grades K – 4, each with a range of challenges from sensory processing, to social, developmental and learning delays, to attentional issues. Such issues don’t tend to be isolated or mutually exclusive but rather layered, so each student has a carefully crafted curriculum that is built around those challenges, said Copeland.
Tailoring the programs to the academic needs of each child is essential, but so are physical exercises and activities that help the students build their gross and fine motor abilities as well as to stimulate their vestibular, proprioceptive, and tactile senses and abilities, providing through yoga, one-on-one exercises and other means what Copeland calls the "neurological reset" that helps so many of her students throughout the day.
"No kidding, this is utopia," said Deneen Wilson, whose son attends Diener. Last year her son attended a synagogue preschool in the morning and a special-needs preschool in the afternoon and resisted going to school every day.
"The proof is in the pudding with my child who resisted going to school last year," Wilson said. This year? "Loves it. Loves it."

FINDING THE RIGHT students for the school is a matter of grouping children together socially, as much as it is to do with their needs, since creating a cohesive classroom environment is of paramount importance, said the Lois McCabe, who directs the school’s enrollment program. To ensure a good fit, maintain a small class size and ensure plenty of individual attention, not all families who apply are accepted. Of 49 applicants for this school year, 19 were accepted and 14 enrolled.
"It’s amazing when it all comes together but it’s a really difficult process to put together," McCabe said. Perhaps the biggest puzzle piece to a student’s well-being — any student, but particularly those with developmental and learning challenges — is to help them build self-esteem. Copeland makes sure that the students are rewarded and acknowledged not for completing specific tasks as much as they are for working hard. To that end, teachers help students construct a graph charting the things they’ve done that day, from working on their math assignments to eating lunch or doing fitness exercises.
"Hard work and effort is really commended here more than ability," Copeland said. "It’s not the product, it’s the process."
It’s a process that is ongoing. Diener is named after Copeland’s grandfather, Jack Diener, who encouraged and supported Copeland in her quest to open the school up to the time of his death shortly before it opened for the 2007 school year. Diener was an inspiration and a support for Copeland, much as Copeland and her staff now are for the students and families of her school.
"She really is the most dedicated, amazing person I’ve ever met in terms of this sort of thing," said Wilson.
To learn more about The Diener School visit thedienerschool.org.