Graduate School of Education: 0601wallach.html

Anne Wallach, who taught writing and literature at San Francisco’s Lowell High School for more than two decades and helped establish the Academic Talent Development Program at UC Berkeley, died of heart failure on Oct. 3. She was 93.

After graduating from UC Berkeley, Anne Kael became an elementary school teacher at Graton in Sonoma County near where she grew up. After marrying Maxwell Wallach, with whom she had three children, Mrs. Wallach earned a master's degree at San Francisco State College, now known as San Francisco State University.

In 1951, she took a job at Lowell, where she taught advanced composition and literature. After retiring from Lowell in 1974 at age 62, Mrs. Wallach moved to Berkeley, where she founded the Academic Talent Development Program (then called the Gifted Program). She directed the Gifted Program for a couple of summers in the 1980s.

She then began to work closely with the California Association for the Gifted because of her passionate faith in the importance of special programs for academically gifted students. Wallach also joined the League of Women Voters of Berkeley, Albany and Emeryville, where her special interest was in improving public education in Berkeley. In addition to monitoring school board meetings, Mrs. Wallach volunteered as an eighth-grade writing coach at Willard Middle School in Berkeley, an activity she continued until a few months before her death.

“My life is as it is, because of Anne,” longtime ATDP staffer, mentor and computer specialist Lloyd Nebres writes. “She encouraged and convinced me to stay on and work full-time at the Gifted Program; to defer graduate school for a while. That was almost 20 years ago; grad school never materialized, because the intervening ferment of working with smart kids, and of my falling into the skin, bones and soul of a mentor, took hold very quickly, and gave texture and meaning to my life.”

Mrs. Wallach is survived by a daughter, Dana Salisbury of Easthampton, Mass.; sons Bret Wallach of Norman, Okla., and Jed Wallach of Freestone in Marin County; two nieces; eight grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.

The family honored her memory by creating an interactive website. Nebres has composed his thoughts on another website devoted to Wallach.