Even after decades as a speech-language pathologist (SLP), Lorie Reese is still awed and humbled by the mechanics of speech—and by the divine attention to detail those mechanics make clear.
“A child’s vocal folds are just a few millimeters of tissue,” said Reese, who leads a team of 85 clinicians providing speech-language pathology services in the Nebo School District in Utah. Also, Reese was the McKay School’s honored alumni for 2024.
“It just blows me away what those millimeters mean to us,” she said. “A voice is such a window into someone’s beautiful soul, and language has so much power. To me, it’s the most powerful thing in the world for good—for all kinds of good purposes.”
Hearing each person’s divine voice, building relationships of trust and belonging, and seeking continual growth and learning have given Reese a career she loves and a positive influence in the lives of thousands of children. But that’s not all. These habits have also given her a family she adores, a home she cherishes, and an ever-deepening trust in a loving Heavenly Father.
“We tend to divide our lives into there’s work, there’s neighborhood, there’s our church calling, and there’s this and that,” Reese said. “But the Lord tells us there’s nothing temporal to Him. Everything is spiritual. And that has infused all my days—to look for that little sparkling bit of humor or to take five more seconds to talk to that one person. If I sit there passively, I’m not happy. But if I take action, it blesses me too.”
Build Trust, the “Water in the Tank”
In her honored alumni speech, Reese noted that as a “broke, first-year speech-language pathologist setting up my speech room,” she had found a poster in a garbage can that now hangs in her office. It reads, “None of us is as smart as all of us,” and it reminds her of the need to trust and empower the people around her.
“My first principal, Dave Rowe at Art City Elementary, would ask us, ‘How’s the water in our fish tank?’” Reese said. “I loved that. To the fish in the tank, the water is invisible, but it is everything. And to us in our workplaces and relationships, trust is everything.” High-trust environments help ideas flow and problems recede, she said, while low-trust environments mean “walls go up . . . and problem-solving comes to a screeching halt.”
Reese has learned to draw on this kind of trust—in others, and in Heavenly Father—throughout her life. Her parents, Bob and Carolyn Reese, met as students at BYU, and Bob’s work took the family all over the country: Minnesota, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and the San Francisco Bay Area, where Lorie Reese enjoyed the beach, the redwood forests, and riding bikes with her parents, brother, and three sisters.
Reese went to high school in Albuquerque and then on to college at BYU, where she was on the women’s soccer team. Playing alongside teammates from Japan, Mexico, and Germany cemented her love of languages, and she majored in linguistics. She also met and married her husband, who became an attorney and joined the Judge Advocate General’s Corps.
Reese and her young family lived in Oregon, Tennessee, Kentucky, and eventually New Mexico, where her husband went into private practice. Along the way the couple welcomed four children: Annie, Rhetta, John, and Janie. Reese loved young motherhood, bonding with local church congregations and teaching piano lessons.
But that life derailed in about 1999, when Reese and her husband split up. The devastating divorce forced her to trust in God—and in a loving circle of friends and family—more than ever.
“We hadn’t been in our ward very long, but the members were absolutely instrumental to our healing,” Reese recalled. “They sent all their kids to our house for piano lessons, whether the kids wanted them or not.
“In some ways I think of it as having to walk out of Eden farther than you ever thought you’d have to go, but it was so good for me. It was my deliverance and my way back home. When you go through it, you realize this is not the rest of my life. This is one chapter, and there will be so much more.”
Deepen Relationships, the “Roots of the Forest”
In her speech, Reese remembered being a Junior Park Ranger in fifth grade and attending camp in a redwood forest. She learned that although redwood trees can approach 400 feet in height and weigh more than a million pounds, they have excessively shallow roots—only about six to nine feet deep.
But there’s a reason for that, she said. “The roots spread out hundreds of feet around the tree. They all intertwine, tangle, knot, and lock with the roots of the other trees around them, until for miles it’s a single woven mat of thick, living roots. They hold one another firmly in place.”
Those roots symbolize the importance of relationships in each human life, Reese said. “These roots hold us accountable to each other and make the forest a thriving place for everyone—kids, families, coworkers—because of the invisible, powerful work going on underneath.”
As she planned her next steps following her divorce, Reese knew the “obvious” choice was to get a job—any job. But she felt prompted to go to graduate school, even though that choice might have looked “luxurious and maybe even selfish” to outsiders. Her family, though, backed her all the way. The only question then was what to study.
“I knew I loved language,” she said. “But I also knew I had to be marketable; I couldn’t do anything unless I knew I could get a job. I knew I loved medical stuff, but not really gory medical stuff. And I was hoping I could work when my kids were at school and follow an academic calendar.”
Reese met with an advisor at the University of New Mexico who suggested speech-language pathology.
“I’d never heard of it, but as we talked, I felt, ‘That’s it,’” she said. “It was language, it was medical, and it was on an academic calendar. Plus, there’s such a shortage [of SLPs]; I will get a job.’ So I started taking prerequisites.”
Reese applied to BYU’s communication disorders program but had to rely more deeply than ever on faith: faith that she could get into the program and that she could make it work in Utah. She did get in, with a full scholarship.
In a whirlwind of just a few days, Reese traveled to Utah for house hunting, found out she’d received a full-price offer on her New Mexico home, and bought a house in Springville. When she registered her children at Art City Elementary, she mentioned her speech therapy studies and was offered a job on the spot—whenever she was ready to take it.
Reese made ends meet as a teaching assistant in graduate school. “It’s hard work, but there’s so much spirituality and positivity and support,” she said. “There was plenty of challenge and opposition, but to land where there were so many good, caring, morally grounded people just restored so much in my soul.”
This time of what Reese calls “extremity”—deep challenges, a huge weight of responsibility, and an uncertain future—was, in retrospect, a time of tremendous growth.
“What finally came to me was that I have a limited amount of time and resources and energy, and they are going to go toward the positive—to my children, to our future,” she said. “I chose the things that gave rest to my soul, even if they didn’t seem restful to others. Those things I was doing for my future became my rest and my deliverance.”
Say Yes, Including to Yourself
In her speech, Reese noted that it was around this time that she adopted a policy of relentless positive action. “I decided in my practice that my answer would always be yes—for parents, teachers, anyone,” she said. “Then together we could figure out ‘Yes to what?’ Sometimes it was just sharing a tip, and sometimes it was finding full-blown qualification for speech-therapy services.”
Reese earned her master’s degree in communication disorders in 2006 and immediately started working for Nebo School District, which had offered her a job years before. She was nurtured there too with supervisors who ensured that she worked in her children’s elementary school.
“I learned so much at work—working with thousands of families—that made me a better parent,” she said. “Sharing that load of family life has also helped my kids be more self-reliant. I think they’ve seen that it’s okay to struggle and work hard and that work doesn’t have to be a grind; it can be a really neat thing.”
That positive approach helped her many years later when she was asked to lead Nebo’s SLPs when the previous head retired.
As a leader, Reese gauged the enthusiasms and passions of her SLPs and assigned them to interest-based teams that research different conditions and brainstorm ways to address them. These groups and their experimental “messy” approaches have worked wonders in children’s lives, Reese said.
“I love the freedom and trust they’ve given me to form these teams, and I love what they’ve done with the trust we put in them,” Reese said. “We’ve given each other permission to not know, to not be perfect. It frees everyone up to feel safe and to feel free to just think out loud, and we find so many solutions that way.”
Her education, and her life, have taught Reese that everything comes back to agency: not just the choices we make but the support we receive to live out those choices and to build good lives. Having received that kind of support, she now delights in providing it.
“I’m always out visiting our schools, and when I go, I would feel so foolish if I walked in saying, ‘Thou shalt do this. I have the answers,’” she said, laughing. “My SLPs are the closest to the situation; they know all the details, the child, the family. They know what to do; they just need the green light or the resources or the validation to go ahead. Giving them that has been such a highlight.”