ABOUT US

Mason Associates is a highly specialized educational consultancy with offices in Boston, Massachusetts, Providence, Rhode Island, and Burlington, Vermont. We work only with children, adolescents and young adults whose educational needs are not being met in traditional settings or at home. We focus solely on two areas: “regular” boarding schools in the US and Canada; therapeutic interventions and including longer-term residential options for underachieving and troubled students from latency-age through college.

We provide parents and their advisors - educators, school and college administrators, lawyers, physicians and mental health professionals - with personalized services and senior-level expertise at competitive rates. Founded in 1987, we have grown steadily by adding experienced educators and clinical professionals and supporting them with infrastructure that permits us to respond appropriately and in a timely way to our clients’ needs, occasionally within 24 hours. We have become the largest specialty consultancy in the Northeast and one of the three or four largest in the US by holding strictly to our narrow focus.

Our clients are referred by word-of-mouth, by school and college administrators, by psychiatrists and mental health professionals, by lawyers and fiduciaries, and by therapeutic schools and programs. Clients are concentrated from New York to Montreal, but we work with families from across the US and Canada. An increasing number of students are coming to us from international referrals, especially from international schools and their local supporting mental health communities. Regardless of the matter at hand, or the referral source, our mission is always to understand each client’s unique needs and circumstances, to respond quickly and effectively, and to do so at a reasonable cost.

Helping discouraged, overwhelmed, underachieving or troubled students is a formidable challenge. Parents often are immobilized by conflicting information from the Internet, neighbors, relatives, teachers, doctors and mental health professionals. It seems everyone has a different opinion, but no one answers the question “. . . what is best for my child?”

For almost twenty years the staff at Mason Associates has been helping parents navigate this complex maze of options. We are one of only a handful of international firms that has the field experience, expert professional background, trained full-time staff and active information networks to quickly give parents the confidence and support needed to help them make timely decisions for their child.

Our services include the development and management of interventions, long-term educational placement and emotional growth strategies for clients from around the world. While we also handle a large traditional boarding school admissions portfolio, the majority of our clients are “at risk” students of all ages. We maintain our narrow focus in order to best help our clients – quickly, efficiently and effectively. As in medicine, law, finance or any other learned profession, serious social, emotional, psychological and behavioral problems demand specialized knowledge and the undivided attention of experienced, caring professionals.

To assure the highest quality service for our clients, we use individuals who are employed full-time by Mason Associates. We do not engage in fee splitting, commissions or sub-contracting with other consultants. This enables us to maintain tight control over all aspects of the placement processes and to obtain greatest staff accountability for our clients. Having everyone working together also assures having multiple intelligences available for work on each child’s placement, as well as being able to mobilize and redirect the firm’s human and systems resources in times of client crisis or elevated demand.

We assure that our professional staff keep current on “best practices” by supporting their attendance at national conferences, by helping them attend and present at professional development trainings, and by getting them out on the road to visit boarding schools, hospitals, therapeutic schools, wilderness programs and our colleagues around the US, Canada and Europe.

Mason Associates receives no commissions or payment from the schools or programs to which we refer students.