Ads Use Famous Figures to Put a Face on a Problem

As a campaign for a school for students in grades 5 through 12 seeks to encourage parents to enroll their children, it also has a larger purpose: helping to change perceptions about students who are described with terms like learning disabilities, learning differences, special needs and special education.

The campaign is for Bridges Academy, in the Studio City section of Los Angeles, which calls itself a school for the twice exceptional, or 2e — that is, students with high abilities who are judged to be talented, gifted or highly gifted and also dealing with conditions like dyslexia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, autism, Asperger syndrome, dysgraphia and problems in processing audio or visual information.

The campaign presents famous achievers from history — like Jane Austen, Charles Darwin, Leonardo da Vinci, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Abraham Lincoln, Michelangelo, Wolfgang Mozart and George Washington — who are identified as “believed to have been twice exceptional, or 2e.”...