2024: #2 Private Company to Watch: White Birch Educational Services

Three-Year Average Annual Growth: 71%
Founded: 2017
Headquarters: 260 Marcy St., Portsmouth
CEO: Laureen Dorow
Total Number of Employees: 95
Product/Service: Provides school psychologists and other special services professionals to school districts

For 15 years, Laureen Dorow worked as a school psychologist through a contracting company. Dorow worked for that company, rather than the district. When that vendor decided to phase out school-based operations, and schools did not fill the gap through their own hiring, Dorow saw a business opportunity.

In 2017, she founded White Birch Educational Services. She initially had seven employees, most of whom were school psychologists, like Dorow. Almost immediately, Dorrow realized “there was so much more need than just school psychologists.”

Today White Birch Educational Services provides an array of special service professionals to 76 schools in 33 districts (all but two are in NH). The 95 employees at the company include 35 school psychologists, along with social workers, board-certified behavior analysts, speech-language pathologists, special education teachers and paraprofessionals.

White Birch provides these workers professional support and benefits, Dorow says, while also helping districts match with skilled professionals that they might otherwise be unable to find.

Dorow knows first-hand that working as a school psychologist or other special needs professional can be isolating. Often, these professionals have no one else in their building who’s doing similar work. White Birch addresses that by matching each employee with a mentor and conducting monthly peer collaboration meetings, as well as professional education.

“We’re providing a lot of training to make sure that those servicing children have a really strong skill set,” Dorow says.

That results in a better match between students’ needs and the local professional able to support them, this serves White Birch’s mission of empowering children and strengthening communities.

“One of the driving factors for me is when a district calls and says they really need help,” Dorow says. “Working in schools, I know what it’s like to be shorthanded. I really want to make that difference for the children and the people who are still in the building working with the [staff] shortage.”