Live Oak Educational Consulting

Natalie was incredibly helpful for our family during an extremely busy time, as we were juggling a newborn while navigating the intensive kindergarten application process.

We relied on Natalie to stay on top of crucial tasks, such as narrowing down schools, creating key points for essays, reviewing parent interview preparations, and preparing for assessments.

She was instrumental in helping us make many difficult decisions, particularly in determining which schools would be the best fit for our family. Natalie created a structured framework for the entire process, providing a much-needed support system for our busy family.

We are thrilled with our application results and highly recommend Natalie to anyone seeking guidance and support throughout the school admissions journey.

Natalie was incredibly helpful for our family. Our neighbor suggested hiring a school search consultant for elementary schools in the Oakland/Berkeley area. My son is "high-functioning" autistic and we wanted to make sure that schools that sounded good on paper would truly be a good fit for him. We signed up for the package where she helps you at every step of the way (getting to know you and your kiddo, identifying public/private/charter options, reminding you of key deadlines, answering any and all questions along the way, connecting with schools directly if you'd like her to, helping prepare for the student interviews and the student assessment visits and the parent interviews, and making the decision). She helped us create and whittle down a great list of schools. In particular, she identified a great school that we weren't very familiar with and I'm very grateful because that's the one we ended up selecting as our first choice and just signed the contract to attend! Natalie is warm, friendly, knowledgable, and most of all, she really knows the people and the schools (especially private schools), so she is a great resource to help those those thorny questions like, "Does this school really have good supports for neurodiverse kids?" or "How are the teachers really at that school?" etc. Definitely recommend.

Live Oak Educational Consulting's webinars gave me a great overview of the public and private school landscape here. I followed up with a one-on-one consultation with Natalie, ending up with a shortlist of schools to consider. It was enormously valuable to have expert help distilling the issues that should guide our decision-making and narrowing down the options. I was looking for someone with a very good understanding of the culture and approach of local schools -- something that would take hours and hours to try to ascertain myself -- and found it in Live Oak Educational Consulting. I really appreciated Natalie's breath of familiarity with local schools. The webinars and consultation gave me a good overall grasp on the process and a clear path forward to selecting a school.

We were seeking someone with educational expertise and knowledge to advice on selection of independent primary schools that would be a good fit for our daughter and family. Natalie was recommended to us by a school director and we are extremely happy with the help and support she provided. Natalie has a great understanding of educational programs and various schools in the east bay and helped us feel more confident in the choices we had made and provided advice regarding the application process and teachers view when it comes to student assessment. I highly recommend her consultation services!