Educational consultants don't have the easiest job in the world. They spend
hours in cars and airplanes traveling from college campuses to boarding schools
and schools for disabled children.
Faye Hart does academic assessments and develops programs for learning
disabled kids. She also does assessment and advocacy work, finds school placements
and refers clients to speech and language programs.
"I love what I do," Hart says.
"You have the opportunity to really delve into a problem and sort your
way through it. The first stage is the diagnosis -- you have to know what's
wrong," she says.
"The challenge for me is to problem solve. I love working with people --
I'm a real people person. I like working with the parents and I love working
with kids, to be able to work with a very unique or individualized program
and then to follow it through."
Margaret Fehrenbach rarely gets to see a person in the flesh. But she still
has time in her busy day to offer individualized service.
"In-person consultation is done as a complement and not for the majority
of the work," she says.
"This will be especially true as I move to international consulting and
online degree completion projects. I sure enjoy the travel aspect since I
get to meet persons that I have only known online!"
For Fehrenbach, educational consulting is a side job. She has her master's
in dental hygiene. She spends a typical day working on seminars, reading journals
to keep current on her profession as a dental hygienist and tending to her
website.
"As you can see, it means being able to juggle many projects and persons
related to them at one time," Fehrenbach says. "I like this aspect, since
you are constantly being challenged and there is never a boring minute. You
are in charge of your career and you make it what it is."
Fehrenbach is optimistic about where the field of educational consulting
is heading. She says that technology will have a lot to do with the way the
field grows.
"I think in the future there will be more and more work in the field of
educational consulting," Fehrenbach says. "There is a move to make education
more responsive to reality and to the needs of the student.
"I think consultants will be part of this move. It is too hard for educators
working on their own to always achieve a new, more responsive level in their
situation. New thought sometimes demands new people to look at the situation."
In New York, George Posner works with families to counsel and guide them
in the educational options they might have for a son or a daughter.
"You need good counseling skills to help people set goals and formulate
plans. And then it depends on what your focus is," Posner says.
Posner says it is uncommon for a parent to come right out and say their
child is in trouble and needs a special program. But there are subtle clues
in the way they talk that Posner is trained to pick up during the interview
process.
"You don't hear, 'My child needs a therapeutic boarding school,'" Posner
says. "You hear, 'My child needs a structured boarding school. Do you know
of any military schools?'"
Posner came to the field of educational consulting after being a high school
counselor.
"When my own child needed some help, needed a school," Posner says, "it
got me very interested in it. I know of several consultants who got into consulting
because of their kids. When you've been through it, it can help parents, too."
Posner says that when he started consulting a few years ago, five or 10
percent of people in certain schools came through consultants. Now, he says,
consultants bring the same institutions 80 or 90 percent of their students.
Educational consultants agree that the most important thing to have for
their work is experience.
"You can't consult about something with which you have not worked," Hart
says. "The field of learning disabilities and attention disorder and Tourette's.
All of these are very involved and require a lot of understanding and learning,
and so you have to have experience."
She has a teaching certificate and a bachelor's degree in psychology. She
says she is continually taking more courses at university.
Her work as an educational consultant, she says, just sort of evolved.
"As time went on, I could see the need. Parents are at such
a loss to know how to handle problem cases."
She describes a letter she received recently. It was from a family who
used her services several years ago. The son they had brought to Hart's services
had just graduated from law school and was about to begin articling.
"They wrote me this lovely letter," she says, "and said that without [her
service], this child would never be where he is today. It went on and on.
"That's a real bonus to hear," Hart says. "It's rewarding to be able to
have a part in someone's life and to know that they don't have to live in
misery."