Our Origin Story

Stephanie Schlie is an intervention specialist with more than eight years’ experience teaching students with autism. In her final year in the public school system, she led a class made up of nonspeaking, minimally speaking, and unreliably speaking students. Time and again, these students made it clear they were capable of much more than most adults believed. Despite being assigned only simple goals—e.g., identifying letters or counting to 10—they could read, spell, understand scientific concepts, or even do complex math problems in their heads!

Many of these students had no reliable independent way to communicate their knowledge! Their fine motor challenges made writing and typing without support extremely difficult. Standardized tests were not made for them. Communication devices had been tried, rejected, and then never tried again. Some students were left with nothing but a “That was easy” style button and a few visual cards to express all the thoughts and feelings they might have. The assumption seemed to be there was not much there to express.

This was unacceptable! Stephanie pushed for more for her students—more recognition of their abilities, more meaningful communication assistance, more dignity and respect. But, advocating for her students within the school system achieved very little, and she realized that the only way to help build an equitable future for them was to step outside the system and create something new.

Determined to create the environment her students deserved, Stephanie founded Mercury Cazimi Education.

Stephanie Schlie, Founder

Mercury Cazimi Volunteers