Heather Richard: A Pediatric Psychologist Who Believes Every Child Deserves to Belong

Heather Richard came to OptimALL Services the way many of the best advocates do — through a friend, a conversation, and a cause that immediately felt personal.

A few years ago, a close friend who sat on the OptimALL board invited Heather to an event and shared what the organization was doing. It didn't take long for the mission to land.

"I was very excited to hear that there was a program and a nonprofit that supported kids in Catholic schools with learning challenges," she says.

For Heather, the excitement wasn't abstract. As a pediatric psychologist, she had spent years working with children in various clinical settings and had long been familiar with the quiet compromise that families of kids with learning differences often faced. If your child needed support services, the assumption was that public school was the path. Faith-based and Catholic schools, however much a family might want them, often simply weren't equipped to say yes.

"I have long thought of needing to send kids to public school to get the assistance that they needed because it wasn't available in the more Catholic or parochial school area," she says.

OptimALL was the answer to a problem she had been watching for years. When a board seat opened, she didn't hesitate.

Now, from her seat on the board, Heather sees an organization that has grown with both ambition and intention. She points to OptimALL's expanding presence in schools, its advocacy work in Columbus, and the coaching it provides to help school leaders navigate the complex needs of students with learning differences. She loves that OptimALL operates not as an outside authority, but as a genuine partner.

"It is not this imposing force of something else that is making it hard for schools to do what they need to do," she says. "It is a team and collaborative approach to looking at each child but also looking at the challenges that teachers have with certain kids."

That collaborative spirit is something Heather returns to often when she talks about OptimALL with people outside the education world. She describes the old image of the resource van in the parking lot — the visual shorthand for a child who needed something the school couldn't provide — and contrasts it with what OptimALL does.

"I love the idea that kids can go to a school that provides faith education and where their family participates in part of the community, but also they can receive support without feeling like they're different or they need to go somewhere else," she says.

For Heather, the stakes of getting this right go far beyond a single school year. She thinks about what it means for a child to spend their elementary and middle school years feeling defeated. She knows it must be hard to arrive at school every day already behind, already exhausted, and never quite experiencing what it feels like to want to learn.

She wants to change that reality for as many kids as she can.

"If kids in these young ages, elementary and middle school, continue to go to school and feel defeated, it's like having a bad job. And then they never know what it is to have a good job, and they don't have the tools to create a good job," she says. "So, if you can give the kids tools emotionally, socially, and academically to understand what it is to wake up and want to go to school, to want to learn, then you're affecting that kid's entire life."

That ripple effect, she believes, is what makes OptimALL's work so much larger than any individual intervention or classroom accommodation. It is, at its core, about expanding opportunity.

"Every child deserves an appropriate and good education in an environment that nurtures them and allows them to thrive," she says. "If we can offer resources and expand the choices for those kids, we're only adding the idea of opportunity, which is what education provides in the first place."