A unique New England college just turned 40 years old.
Landmark College welcomed its first class to campus in Putney, Vermont, during a time when few neurodivergent students went to college, let alone graduated.
“Most existing college programs at the time simply offered students accommodations like books on tape or a scribe to help write your papers or somebody to take notes for you,” recalled founding academic dean Jim Baucom. He said when he was recruited to help launch Landmark, he was reluctant because there was no blueprint to follow.
But that gap in the American higher education landscape created an opportunity.
After Windham College went bankrupt in 1978 and closed its campus in Putney, the federal government proposed turning the property into a minimum-security prison. Local politicians and voters had another idea. Led by future Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin, the Putney Select Board rejected the prison plan and instead pitched the property as a school to help students who, like Shumlin, had dyslexia.
Shumlin and another board member drove to Massachusetts to meet Dr. Charles Drake, the Harvard-educated head of Landmark School, which served K-12 students who learn differently.
“My Landmark was a teacher who saw something in me in second grade and dragged me literally to her log cabin to teach me how to read day after day just because she saw something there that was more than other teachers saw,” Shumlin said during the college’s 40th anniversary ceremony in September.
The three-term Vermont governor laughed as he remembered the school’s shaky beginnings, from the leaky roofs to leadership who looked too young to have their own drivers’ licenses.
“If you had said to me: ‘Are you going to a 40th anniversary for Landmark College? I would have said, ‘Truthfully, I don’t think we’re going to make 40 days!’”
Yet, they did. Awareness of neurodiversity has grown since the school’s founding — and so has the college. That first year, 77 students showed up, eager to learn. Landmark now enrolls more than 400 students.
“The support for neurodiverse students is not contained to one department. All of the staff here have familiarity with neurodiversity, with students with autism, students who have dyslexia.”Corey Bub, a student from Westerlo, N.Y.
The college offers small classes and individualized instruction. Faculty focus not just on what their students learn but how they learn, teaching them skills that other schools largely ignore: note-taking, reading strategies and time management.
“We are teaching meta-cognition, self-awareness and self-advocacy,” said professor Rebecca Matte, who has worked at Landmark for 30 years. She describes herself as hyperactive.
“We all got something,” she laughed. “But is it disabling — and in what environments is it disabling, right? In this environment, many of our students are less disabled, and they’re figuring out how to make it work.”
First-year student Adrian Jay Neuman of Andover, Massachusetts, has ADHD and autism, and says he likes “putting things in little boxes.” Growing up, school came easily to him — until sophomore year of high school.
“I just hit a wall. Suddenly, natural talent was not good enough,” Neuman recalled.
“Habits are really difficult for me, because they either form within a week or they just don’t form at all,” he explained. “I’m trying to learn how to mitigate that and make it a slightly more normal time frame of learning a habit.”
Neuman’s classmates, Isaac Fynewever-Muyskens from Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Corey Bub from Westerlo, New York, said Landmark is the first place where they’ve felt understood.
“Being in a community of people that all have that similar experience is really, really powerful,” Fynewever-Muyskens said.
“The support for neurodiverse students is not contained to one department,” Bub added. “All of the staff here have familiarity with neurodiversity, with students with autism, students who have dyslexia.”
Neuman plans to study biology, grow his skills, regain confidence in the classroom, and then transfer to a college that has a dedicated forensics program. Over four decades, Landmark has enrolled nearly 10,000 students, many gaining the confidence and strategies to transfer elsewhere. But some stay.
Marc Thurman of Morristown, New Jersey, came to Landmark at the age of 23 after trying a community college.
“I was ready to leave home and come to Vermont,” he said. “I didn’t care [that] I didn’t know how to ski. I wanted to be part of something different, and I was open-minded.”
Thurman graduated with a communications degree in 2019 and now directs Landmark’s centers for diversity and inclusion and coaches its men’s basketball team.
“I’m a Black man in America, and what I’ve been able to accomplish and where I’ve come from — opportunity don’t come around,” he said. “This is where you can really tap into your superpower and be who you are. No one’s judging anyone.”
At a time when federal support for special education is shrinking, founding academic dean Jim Baucom said the small school in Putney is still fighting to change lives.
“These days educational programs are struggling and there’s a push to stay away from words like diversity,” he said, sitting in the same boardroom where he attended hundreds of faculty meetings. “Landmark College has always been into the idea of celebrating diversity and neurodiversity in all its forms.”
That commitment, Baucom said, may be the school’s greatest superpower — and one that keeps drawing students to this small campus in the foothills of the Green Mountains.
