Andrea is a life-long Alaskan, graduated from Service High School in Anchorage and attended college at The University of the Pacific in Stockton, California. She initially pursued International Relations and Journalism but quickly found that her idea of International Relations was more about wanting to work with people. She chose to take a course called Communication Disorders as an elective the spring of her freshman year and the rest is history.

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Andrea graduated with her Masters in Communication Disorders in 1993 and started at Providence Hospital, primarily in adult rehabilitation. Treating stroke, head injury, laryngectomy, ALS, MS, Huntington's Disease and some services with children. She later joined the Anchorage School District where the majority of her time was spent at Tyson Elementary. She had the pleasure of working with Susan Diemer in her Life Skills classroom and with Amanda Goodrich in Special Education. This started her experience in the world of Autism. Being able to work alongside these ladies, taught her a lot about what it means to get through a school day with a disability and allowed Andrea to hone the skills to understand how a speech pathologist could affect the school day. She attended the majority of the IEP, Behavior Plan meetings, took part in the response to intervention team and has a very good understanding of the IEP process.

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Andrea found herself wanting more of a whole family approach to working with children with communication deficits. Discovering an opportunity at FOCUS in Eagle River, which is a non-profit agency that services individuals with developmental needs from birth to adulthood. With a recently opened outpatient clinic and looking to expand, Andrea joined FOCUS in June 2014. She enjoyed developing summer camps, social groups for ages 7-20 for kids who have a hard time navigating the social world and individual services for clients from 18 months to young adults.  Families joined Andrea in treatment sessions, where she could teach and guided them in how they could help their child advance outside of the clinic. Working with FOCUS was a fantastic learning experience, in August 2019 Andrea decided it was time to go full time into her own private practice.