It has been a blessing working with Karen. Before meeting her, I struggled to find answers to concerns I had regarding my daughter’s language needs. Within minutes of first meeting with Karen, she validated my concerns and came up with goals for intervention. She worked with my daughter over ten sessions, focusing on improving her expressive language, articulation, and oral motor abilities. I was able to witness tremendous growth in a matter of a few weeks. In addition, she provided my daughter with self-regulation strategies that she could independently implement, or implemented with support if needed, to help her identify when she was feeling overwhelmed and/or overstimulated. More importantly, she helped my daughter become more confident as her language disability was negatively impacting her learning and social relationships due to anxiety. Karen continues to go out of her way to be a contributing member of her educational team and has provided hours of support when I have reached out to her for guidance. There aren’t enough words to describe the impact Karen has made in our lives, especially my daughter’s, and for that, I am forever grateful! I highly recommend working with Karen as she is deeply committed to providing extraordinary intervention to improve the lives of her clients.

-Lauren M

I attended the “Picky Eaters” workshop hoping to get some tips that I could share with the parents who have children at our Nursery School and with my own children who have preschoolers of their own…

But I left with much more: I learned about the thirty-two steps (Dr. Kay Toomey) and four stages to eating. I was introduced to the Sapere Method of teaching children to eat through their senses and was amazed at how little food intake children actually need to meet their daily nutritional requirements. Not only was the workshop enlightening and instructive, but Karen had an organized and well thought-out way of presenting the material. She gave us resources and contact information to reference moving forward.

-Joanne Buermann M.Ed.

My son Cayden was diagnosed with Childhood Apraxia of Speech when he was 2 years old.  I was told that with his diagnosis, there was no way to know if or when he would be able to start talking.   He had been receiving speech therapy since he was 10 months old, and after one year and three different speech therapists, Cayden was still considered non-verbal and hadn’t made a single sound during his speech therapy sessions.  He didn’t have the ability to imitate sounds and nothing his different therapist tried had worked.

I was scared that Cayden may not ever have the ability to talk, and it is something that I worried about every day.  We took Cayden to see his Neurologist, and he recommended that we try to find a speech therapist who was trained in PROMPT (PROMPTS for Restructuring Oral Muscular Phonetic Targets) therapy because many of his patients with severe speech disorders showed great improvement with this method of therapy when traditional speech therapy was not working.

I am a member of an online support group for children with Apraxia and had read multiple parent discussions on how much PROMPT therapy had helped their children with severe Apraxia, but I didn’t think I could possibly find someone who had this special training in our small town.  I searched the PROMPT Institute’s website and was so happy to find that there was one speech therapist experienced in this method in my region- Karen Rodgers.  It didn’t take long once Cayden started seeing Karen for her to help him make his first sounds using PROMPT techniques. I remember crying tears of joy when we got to hear his sweet voice.  I was amazed to see how she had made such a huge difference in such a short amount of time.After several months he went from single sounds to full words- it was incredible!  Karen worked with Cayden 3 days per week for 16 months and even took the time to show me how to help cue him at home so that he would get as much help as possible to help him succeed.  Karen impressed me with her knowledge, expertise, dedication, compassion, and persistence.  She is by far the best speech therapist that Cayden has ever had, and I feel privileged to have had the opportunity to have her work with him.  I will be forever grateful to Karen for being the one and only person who was able to help Cayden find his voice.  It is because of her that he can now talk, and words can’t begin to express how thankful I am!