Florence has been in her dream profession—speech-language pathology—since 2003. She enjoys conducting evaluations and providing treatment to school-age students to help them improve their language skills. She particularly enjoys working on the link between spoken and written language.

Speech-language pathology is a second career for Florence as she spent a couple of years as a middle school English Language Arts (ELA) teacher before enrolling in graduate school to become an SLP. She is happy to be utilizing some of the expertise that she developed as an ELA teacher in conjunction with her speech-language pathology training in order to help children with spoken and written language disorders. 

Florence is trained in several multisensory, synthetic, phonics-based programs. She received AOGPE Orton Gillingham (OG) training at the Associate level through the Schenck School. She is also formally trained in several additional Orton-Gillingham based programs including Wilson, Spalding, and Barton. For pre-readers and early-readers, she sees great progress using the Lively Letters program to target phonological awareness and early decoding prior to moving to an OG approach. For more advanced readers, she often draws on the Structured Word Inquiry (SWI) training that she completed with Pete Bowers and Rebecca Loveless. She loves how SWI incorporates morphology, phonology, etymology, and orthography into reading and spelling instruction.

For spoken and written expression, Florence uses several approaches to ensure that the prerequisite spoken language skills are in place prior to writing. For example, she often uses the Story Grammar Marker to teach narrative structure for both spoken and written narratives. Florence frequently utilizes Voyager Sopris's Step Up to Writing and William Van Cleave's Writing Matters to help students organize their informational discourse and writing. In addition, she is certified in Handwriting Without Tears.

Florence also draws on her training in several Lindamood Bell programs: Lindamood Phoneme Sequencing (LiPS) which targets phonological awareness, Seeing Stars which targets orthographic mapping/reading, and Visualizing & Verbalizing which targets listening and reading comprehension.

Florence received a Bachelor of Science degree in Elementary Education in 1996 and graduated Summa Cum Laude from Arizona State University with a Master of Science degree in Communication Disorders in 2003. She has also completed Georgia ETA's Complete Reading Series.

Florence maintains a Certificate of Clinical Competence from the American Speech-Language Hearing Association (ASHA) as well as SLP licensure in the state of Georgia.  She is also a member of the International Dyslexia Association. Florence is committed to evidence-based practice and closely follows the research in the field to ensure that she is providing assessments and therapy that align with the field's best practices.

In her spare time, Florence loves traveling, reading, organizing, and spending time with her husband, five children, and two rescue dogs.