About Me

Post-Secondary Transition Consultant

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I bring 25 years of experience as an educator to my current role as a consultant specializing in helping students with learning differences, neurodivergence, and mental health challenges find appropriate post-high school transition programs. For 20 years, I taught high school English at independent schools in the Greater Washington area including The Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School, Madeira, and National Cathedral School.  As a classroom teacher, I saw how students with learning differences, ADHD, autism, anxiety and depression struggled academically and emotionally, and in 2019 I pivoted my career to focus specifically on those populations.  From 2019-2024, I worked as the academic advisor at an intensive outpatient young adult mental health treatment center.  There, I saw that students who went off to college who weren’t ready, or who were vulnerable, could risk facing a mental health crisis that would take significant time, effort, and resources to recover from.  Once those young adults stabilized with intensive therapies, I would step in to help them earn credits from classes they left abruptly during their crisis, reenroll in their previous college or apply to a better-fit school and bravely try to do college, again, this time with adequate mental health, academic, and executive functioning support. 

 

As the parent of a neurodivergent son, I wanted to do what I could to avoid my child going off to college and experiencing a crisis like the crises I had helped my clients overcome.  I worried about the ‘cliff’ my child faced at the end of high school, when the support given by an IEP and various providers disappeared.  Determined to find a “right fit” for my son, I extensively researched and vetted options, from short and long-term neurodiverse-affirming therapeutic programs, to transitional life skills programs, inclusive vocational training programs, and embedded support programs for neurodivergent students within small colleges.

 

With empathy as a parent who ‘gets it,’ and an educator specializing in neurodivergence, I want to help families do what I did for my son: find the right program where your child will thrive and shape their own bright future.  I want to help normalize that there are paths other than immediate 4-year college that prepare a young adult for independence and adulthood, paths that support emotional wellbeing so a young adult can grow to their full potential in a supported environment.