YOU could easily miss the sign, the one high on the yellow-painted wall of the converted school-house on Church Road in Southampton, announcing the premises of Bercon Ltd. If the sign was proportionate to the enthusiasm of the educational consultants inside, a larger wall would be required.

Angela Fubler, who started the company late in 2001, left the security of the Ministry of Education for the more anxious, if more challenging, world of self-employment. She has since been joined by consultants Mary Giordano and Crystal Burgess, and these three, together with their charmingly polite receptionist Leanne Hollis, constitute the entire complement of Bercon.

Mrs. Fubler, a devout Christian and life-long soldier in the Salvation Army, believes that Bercon is her 'ministry'.

"I have always been an 'ideas' person. I worked for the Ministry of Education for 11 years, first as an educational therapist, later as the 'Cadet' programme director at Warwick Camp. In pursuit of a PhD in organisational leadership, I took two courses locally, one on consulting, and I realised that I could put that into operation right away.

"Bercon started when parents asked me to observe their child in the classroom, and I agreed to do so, on condition that they understood that I would not be able to undertake any intervention work. But when I wrote up the report, I just could not leave the child, based on my own recommendations. In the end, there were so many referrals, I knew I had to make a decision."

Mrs. Fubler did not think of herself as a business person, and she concedes it took her some time to concentrate on the basic business essentials. For her, Bercon was a new way to be of service.

"I'm an 'interventionist', and it was a huge undertaking for me to take on the role of business owner. But I just naturally enjoy working with people, children in particular. It's innate, the wish, even the need, to help people. It's about trust and integrity, that's huge for me, the pinnacle of what we do here, in terms of how we operate."

Given Bercon's early concentration on children with learning difficulties, most initial referrals, for tutoring or learning support, came from the Reading Clinic. Mrs. Fubler can work with children up to 18 years old. She attended Whitney Institute, and today, she sits on its board of trustees

"My first degree, in 1988, was a bachelor's degree in Linguistics from Mount St. Vincent University in Halifax. I worked as a para-educator for speech pathologists in the Ministry of Education, intending to specialise in speech pathology, but when I started to work with children, I saw a need to deal with their behaviour.

"So, I went back to Mount St. Vincent and earned a degree in Child Study in 1993, majoring in developmental disabilities and programme development. I came back again to Bermuda, and got a job as an educational therapist. During summers, I completed my master's in Education in 1996, majoring in adolescent behaviour."

She believes that being able to handle the full spectrum of child development has been helpful for her, and for the families she works with. "I have covered the whole range of learning difficulties: speech and language, learning, special needs. I know the whole educational system: public, private, pre-school, primary, middle and senior. I know which resources to bring to bear for a particular child.."

During her last year at the Ministry, Mrs. Fubler began to teach evening classes at the Bermuda College, and, five years later, continues to teach its Child and Youth Studies programme. Also, Bercon has started a tutoring programme, the Bermuda National Tutoring Institute, essentially a matching service for parents, and mostly, but not always, outsourced. There are three Bercon tutors who work on a part-time basis.

In addition to these tasks, and her work with individual children, Mrs. Fubler has organised a series of child management workshops at CedarBridge and the Gilbert Institute, and is beginning a workshop at Warwick Pre-School on Parenting and Behaviour Management. "My real area of expertise is working with parents. I enjoy that, listening to and talking to parents, and the other consultants will usually refer parents to me. Our mission is to provide a supportive service to children and their families in the area of education.

"We always try to work with the child and the parent. Behaviour can show up at school that really originated at home, like sibling rivalry, for example. With most of our educational therapy support services, we have to go into the home to work with the families."

Outside of Bercon, her focus is on husband Brian and her two children, 14-year-old Britanni and ten-year-old Brian, Jr. "They are my recreation. I set that as a standard, given what I do. I practise what I preach. My mission in life is to enhance my community. My heart and soul is in making my part of Bermuda better. We all have a piece to take care of, and I have found mine.

MARY Giordano met Angela when she arrived in Bermuda seven years ago. She had always worked as a speech therapist, and after her children, now 11 and nine, were in school, she was able to join Bercon, whose flexible hours suited her family responsibilities.

"I did a lot of voluntary work, but I realised that my job was always such an important part of who I was, and I couldn't let that go. The key motivating factor for me is having the parents in the room, and training them, because we have so little time with the children. Basically, I try to train the parents to be as good at this work as I am, and work myself out of the job. That's the goal. It's not rocket science. They can do it at home, at breakfast, at lunch, in the car. My specialty is speech and language therapy. Some little ones can't say words or comprehend words, and some older children say them beautifully, but they can't pull out that word they want. Most of us occasionally suffer from the 'tip-of-the-tongue' phenomenon, but some children have that chronically.

"I love language therapy, but I do speech, because there are children who lisp or have poor production, who mis-articulate sounds. With 'specific language impairment' disorder, children may be developing normally, they crawl and walk at the right ages, but in the area of language, they are specifically showing delays in comprehension and expression. These children are part of my current case load of 18. I see about half of my children, ranging in age from two to 16, at the Bercon office, and the other half at school or home."

Kansas City-born Mrs. Giordano studied speech therapy at the University of Missouri before heading east to do her master's at Emerson College in Boston. She did a two-year internship at Boston Children's Hospital and worked at the New York League for the Hard of Hearing, where she featured in a CBS 60 Minutes segment on cochlear implants for children. She moved to St. Luke's Roosevelt Hospital in New York as a consultant for medically fragile and globally physically-handicapped children.

She worked briefly at Long Island College Hospital, then as an assistant professor at Queen's College supervising its graduate therapy clinic, before life brought her to Bermuda. Mary had a special reason to be drawn to the field, because she had speech and language difficulties as a child

"No one could understand me as a three and four year old. I didn't really get my speech resolved until I was in fourth grade. I was teased terribly, so I really understand the problem.

"In every place I worked, people took a lot of time to train me. Now we get some referrals from Boston Children's Hospital, because that's where I started. Children with cerebral palsy, or other global developmental delays, who are just not speaking at all. They benefit from using pictures to communicate, and that's an area of expertise at Boston Children's. The children go to the communication enhancement centre there, and then because the hospital staff know I am here, they refer some of the children to me for more of the in-depth evaluation that they can't do there in an hour and a half."

Crystal Burgess, the newest arrival, was a colleague of Angela Fubler's at the Ministry of Education. She was a guidance counsellor after graduation and they worked together on a project a year ago.

"Angela was very familiar with my background and training, which included work on programmes at St. Brendan's and the Women's Resource Centre, and some part-time research at the National Drug Commission. After some discussion, she thought that my expertise would fit well with the Bercon philosophy, and that I could supplement many of the services they were trying to provide. My actual title is Programme Development Manager."

CRYSTAL has a bachelor's degree in Sociology from the University of Maryland and a master's degree in Social Work from Howard University. Her field of practice is mental health, but her specialisation is children and families. She develops the programmes that are supplemental to Bercon's speech and language and educational therapy components.

"We are looking at anger management, which is such a huge issue now. We are starting a course, a pilot programme, on April 17, and it will run for eight sessions until June 5.

"Many people may think that anger management courses are always crisis-oriented and reactive, but this programme is meant to be proactive and preventative. Parents may want children to have the coping skills to deal with conflict.

"Most programmes concentrate only on the children, but our course will run concurrent sessions with the children and the parents, or some appropriate adult representative. So the care-givers and the children will learn the same skills at the same time. We want to start with small groups, so we will start with six to eight children, and their parents or care-givers.

"Depending on the feedback from the community, we want to develop a Life Skills programme. There seems to be a great need for that type of training. It's on the back-burner just now, but I would like to develop that.

"On a micro level, I do help with individual cases. If there are issues we can't address, we will refer the family to outside agencies, both private and public. Most of the children I work with are in the ten- to 15-year age range."

Crystal is a voracious reader, and is currently working on another master's degree. In the world of educational consulting, it seems that learning never ends.