Sterling Magnolia Mediation & Education LLC was founded to provide professional dispute resolution, educational, and counseling services to students, families, and school districts. Our approach to our clients is to ensure the personal touch and details are taken care of as the services are being provided. Each of our clients are unique and we feel that a personal approach to our client solutions should be too.

At Sterling Magnolia Mediation & Education LLC, we take pride in serving a small specialized niche that entails an individualized approach for delivering our products and services. We are a boutique education service provider because we personalize our service outcomes to benefit our customers.

Dr. Holmes is a certified school counselor with a vast array of professional experience that includes social services in the areas of child support - including paternity and agreed orders, homelessness/housing, and community development. Dr. Holmes has monitored regulatory compliance for grants funded by the US Dept. of Housing & Urban Development and managed the grant award process for public service entitlement funds for Harris County. This is where her passion was guided towards education and she became a part of an award winning grants team for nearly 10 years for the 7th largest school district in the nation. Student achievement and school improvement were major themes in her team's work as they deep-dived many needs assessments of the students, teachers, programs, and processes of the district. Dr. Holmes saw a need for more direct assistance to students via support services, greater parent outreach, and face-to-face communications to build relationships, and so her research and additional studies began. Dr. Holmes continues to work with parents and families and began informally helping families with college access and admissions chats during routine games on the sideline or court side with other parents of her son’s AAU basketball teams. The idea to provide free and paid formal services, was literally spoken into existence by other parents who had lots of questions about post-secondary athletics, course taking, career exploration/planning, and scholarships. Dr. Holmes noted parents’ number one response to the information was, “I wish we had this information when our kid(s) was (were) much younger.” The call to action was activated.

Dr. Holmes holds a bachelor’s degree from Texas State University in Journalism with a concentration in Advertising and a minor in Business Administration; a master’s degree in Sociology from Prairie View A & M University, and a doctorate’s degree in education leadership concentrated on counselor education from Texas Southern University. She has presented at many conferences and professional development workshops in her areas of expertise, as well as attended many professional offerings in those areas to keep abreast of emerging trends and best practices. Dr. Holmes has been a contract grant panelist and grant reviewer for the US Dept. of Health & Human Services - Office of Minority Health, US Department of Education, and the US Department of Labor across the years since 2001. In addition, Dr. Holmes holds a certificate in Project Management from the University of Houston – Dept. of Continuing Education and has completed requirements for practicing Texas alternative dispute resolution (ADR) professionals through Manousso Mediation & Arbitration, LLC, including: Basic Mediation, Ethics, Advanced Mediation (Family/Divorce/Child Custody), Parent Coordinator/ Parent Facilitator and Arbitration. Dr. Holmes is certified in special Education early childhood - 12th grade (EC-12) and school counseling EC-12 by the state of Texas.