Denise C. DeCoste
Denise DeCoste, Ed.D., is an occupational therapist and a special educator with 30 years of experience in the field of assistive technology (AT). For two decades, she led high and low incidence AT teams for Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS), the 14th largest school district in the U.S. In 2003, she began building awareness of UDL in MCPS and systematically implementing UDL across schools in the district. She has authored publications on augmentative communication, on AT to support reading and writing, on AT services in school settings, and on scaling UDL at the district level.
In 2010, she was the governor-appointed chair of the Maryland State Department’s UDL Task Force, which led to the approval to incorporate UDL principles into the Code of Maryland Regulations. Denise was the Vice Chair of the UDL-Implementation Research Network, chaired two successful UDL-IRN summits and was actively involved in UDL-IRN operations.
Denise is moving toward real retirement, traveling for pleasure rather than for work. She resides on Cape Cod and loves to play golf, practice yoga and Tai Chi, and has a never-ending list of books she wants to read.