Sivan Schondorf, Founder of the Center for Special Education Services
Name: Sivan Schondorf
Founder: Center for Special Education Services
What do you do?
My company does special education testing in public school districts, charter schools, and private schools to keep school districts in compliance and reduce district staff burnout, by testing in psychoeducation (academic and/or cognitive), speech and language, early childhood assessments, autism assessments, OT/PT, and via bilingual testing. I supervise much of the testing and oversee all departments.
What's your story?
I started as a speech-language pathologist in the schools 20+ years ago and then began a mobile early childhood assessment team 10 years ago. A year later, my brother and I teamed up and expanded to other multidisciplinary evaluations, and in 2022 we also opened a therapeutic day school with another partner.
Through this work, I’m able to stay deeply connected to my field, while helping thousands of students and families each year and building a meaningful, growing business.
What does BEING a FoundHer mean to you?
Being a founder means creating something with purpose that makes a real impact. For me, it’s about combining my clinical expertise with entrepreneurship to help more students and families than I ever could alone. It’s also important to me that my children see that women can build meaningful careers, lead organizations, and maintain professional identities and passions.
How do you support other female founders and women in business?
I buy products for female founders; starting a new podcast we are featuring female founders in related wellness, health, and therapy professions; referring to females in businesses as much as possible. I think it's so important to support each other and help one another thrive, not to compete with each other!
Who is a female entrepreneur you look up to and why?
Rebecca Minkoff, she is open about her personal life, her struggles, her journey, and she is honest about her brand, what it is and isn't.
Who is someone who has helped change or shape your business for the better and what did they do to help you?
A district superintendent took a chance on me by hiring me to do a type of assessment that only people within the district had done before. This launched my entire business.
At what point did you make your company a full time gig? How did you know the time was right?
It was part-time for about 4 years, which also coincided with covid, when I needed to be home with my kids, particularly one of my children who was still in preschool. As we expanded to more districts and my children were back in school, I knew I was needed and could handle the full-time responsibility.
Let’s talk social media—who handles it for your company (you, an internal team member, an outsourced solution?) and what is the secret to making it successful? What is the biggest challenge?
Socials are a bit tricky for my company. We are not a type of business where one person buys a product.
We are mostly hired by school districts, so it is the board or a district superintendent/director of special education that decides if they want to utilize our services. We have a LinkedIn page and a small facebook page to discuss conferences we attend, SPED related updates, etc. We have an intern we use to create some of our holiday and special education content, and I have made posts and some reels myself about what we do.
What is something you do differently from the industry standard?
Most special education contract companies place daily contractors in a school 3-5 days a week. Essentially, the job for them is done once they recruit a therapist.
We function more like a private practice and contracting company hybrid. We are placing therapists into matching nearby schools for testing daily, and each assessment and report are supervised by one of our in house leadership team therapists. In this way we maintain quality control, have a personal relationship with each therapist and district and are part of the entire process. This creates more trust with the families and schools we service, and our own therapists have support from our team to grow as professionals.
Have you sold a business? If so, how did you know when it was time to sell? What were the steps you took to make it happen? What advice would you give to someone looking to sell?
We are constantly getting calls about selling our business because bigger companies want to buy us before we grow bigger and become more expensive. We always take calls and see what companies are interested in and if we could be a future match, but right now we are not ready, at least not this month!
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