Our Team | Advocate to Educate

Meet Our Team

Our Advocates are locally based and nationally connected. We are proud to provide our advocacy services in the South Bay of California, and also maintain a network of providers and team members all over the country. This allows us to stay abreast of the current best practices and draw from resources that directly result in success for our clients!

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"When I reached out, Eryn called me right away. Great customer service! " - James, Torrance Ca

Meet our Advocates!

Office Manager

Jennifer is a military spouse, mom, to two kids and gained her first experience with IEPs and
Special Education when her son was diagnosed with Dyslexia. Military moves and multiple
school districts brought Jen to Advocate to Educate as a client to help improve the support and
services for her son. After 4 years as a client, Jen came on board as the office manager taking
care of scheduling, billing and day to day tasks behind the scenes between parents, advocate
and school teams. She is currently working on her Board Certification to become a Education
Advocate.

Qualifications

B.S. in Business Administration, minor in Accounting from Moorhead State University

Eryn Schnel Yolac, BCEA

Founder & Board Certified Education Advocate

Advocate to Educate founder and owner Eryn Schnel Yolac is a wife and proud parent of two great kids. She was also diagnosed with Dyslexia at age six. Her personal experiences and struggles to find proper reading intervention and mental health services as a child are what has inspired her to continue her life's mission: advocating for children just like her.

Eryn's professional training began in the classroom as a special education teacher and progressed quickly when she decided to devote all her time and educational abilities to becoming a Board-Certified Education Advocate. She has extensive experience advocating for children with Learning Disabilities, Intellectual Disabilities, Anxiety, and Depression and has managed with a wide variety of complex cases requiring intensive academic support, medical care, and residential treatment.

Qualifications & Professional History

BA in Education, Antioch University LA
Credentialed Special Education Teacher with 15 years of classroom experience
Nationally Board Certified Education Advocate™, Fellow (NSEAI)
COPAA-SEAT Training
Educational Therapist Certificate Program- Association Of Educational Therapists
Dyslexia Advocate Certificate Program - Dyslexia Institute of San Diego
Certified PEERS Provider: teaching social skills to teens and young adults.
BA in Photography, Brooks Institute of Photography

Dr.Karen Komosa Hawkins

Advocate

Dr.Karen Komosa-Hawkins is a educational advocate who has worked directly with Advocate To Educate since 2018. Throughout her career, Karen has trained, mentored, and supervised hundreds of school-based psychologists across three local school districts, at LMU, and beyond. Her primary focuses include facilitating educational equity and authentic inclusion as well as research-based practices.

Karen has worked directly with and advocated on behalf of individuals with exceptional needs in a variety of capacities for nearly three decades. Her work has included conducting independent educational evaluations, specializing in educationally related mental health disabilities, as well as a variety of other disability and advocacy-related services.

Qualifications & Professional History

Associate Clinical Professor and Assistant Director for the School Psychology Program within the School of Education at Loyola Marymount University (LMU)
B.S. in Human Development and Family Studies from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
M.A. in Community Counseling
Ph.D. in School Psychology from Loyola University Chicago.
Holds credentials in school psychology and administrative services and a license in educational psychology.

How Advocate To Educate Began

After 15 years of teaching special education and becoming a Nationally Board Certified Education Advocate™, Eryn noticed that children with learning differences were often spending six straight hours at school without having any of their unique needs met. Most of them continued to remain behind in multiple academic areas and often required specific intervention that should have been a part of their IEP services.

She identified three areas of attention that could drastically improve the system:

Developing more appropriate special education services
Establishing more effective collaboration with the school team
Better educating parents of their rights and resources

Eryn realized that if we could just focus on improving these three factors, children would have better long-term functional outcomes while simultaneously earning the opportunity to achieve meaningful academic progress. If this is the sort of success plan you want for your child, CLICK HERE to learn about our Educational Consultations and how we can help.

We help families in these districts!

👉 Torrance Unified School District

👉 Redondo Beach School District

👉 Hermosa Beach School District

👉 Long Beach Unified School District

👉 El Segundo Unified School District

👉 Los Angeles Unified School District

👉 Manhattan Beach Unified School District

👉 Palos Verdes Peninsula Unified School District

👉 Norwalk-La Mirada Unified School District

Don't see your district listed? No problem.

We cover all of California.

Book a free chat with us!

* Information and referrals may be provided and nothing is offered as, nor should be considered as medically diagnostic or as legal or medical advice. Referrals may be made and are for information purposes only, and no responsibility is accepted associated with the consequences that arise from commerce or dealings with an individual, professional, organization or a corporation. A referral does not imply an endorsement, and an omission does not imply a non-endorsement.