As you raise your head above the receding tide of holiday get-togethers with all the accompanying clutter, prepare to duck again: For those with school-age kids, another wave of chaos is cresting.

With classes finally under way, the incoming flood of paper is growing by the day. Backpacks pile up in the foyer, art projects tile the refrigerator, unsigned permission slips mount like autumn leaves. Even with sukka decorations put away, shalom bayit, or household harmony, becomes even more elusive.

This could be a time to call in the experts to cope with both the parents' paperwork and the kids' stuff, before the incoming material settles in archeological layers. If prior efforts to go it alone have failed year after year, maybe professional help can make the difference.

Julie Isaacs is one of a growing cadre of organization experts. The Scotch Plains-based mother of two owns her own business, The Uncluttered Home, and is a member of the National Association of Professional Organizers. In addition to helping people tidy up their homes, she provides regular coaching in organization and time-management.

Isaacs, a member of Congregation Beth Israel in Scotch Plains, also does a fair amount of public speaking on the subject to groups, including preschool parents at the Jewish Community Center of Central New Jersey, and Na'amat USA, a women's Zionist group.

She knows the chaos people face, not only from her own home, but from the dozens she has seen. One of the best parts about consulting people like her is hearing descriptions of homes messier than one's own.

She knows too about the paper deluge. "It's the biggest fallacy that working with computers, we'd have less paper to deal with," she said. "I don't know what the statistics are, but I know that there's much more."

This is her claim: "There are definitely ways to make the back-to-school transition more manageable. One of the best ways is to make everyone in the family responsible for putting items in their 'homes.' Even young children can be taught to put their shoes on a rack or hang their backpack on a hook."

Parents have to set the example, she said. Without positive role modeling, you can't expect children to get it right. If you are a pat rack, there is a good chance they will be.

The key is "constant purging," Isaacs said. "You can't maintain order if you keep every piece of paper. If a baseball flyer comes home and your kid doesn't play baseball, throw it out on the spot! You have to be decisive about what stays and what goes."

With daughters age six and nine, Isaacs' home gets messy too, she said. Discussing tidiness in the middle of the Columbus Day holiday, she said, "After they've had a playdate, it can look like a bomb hit. The big difference is how easy it is to clean up. My kids know that even if they don't tidy up immediately after their friends leave, before they go to bed they have to put everything back in its 'home.' If everything has its place, that doesn't take long, but if you leave things for two or three days, it gets much harder to deal with."

Isaacs said she herself wasn't always tidy. As a teenager and a college student, she insisted, she was pretty disorganized. She learned her organizational skills over time, first as a teacher helping her students handle their material, and then reading and researching what the experts had to say and trying out her own ideas on friends' homes, working at first for free, until she felt she had marketable techniques.

What with ever-growing consumerism and more mothers working, the organization business has become a multi billion-dollar industry. NAPO has close to 4,000 members, up from 1,500 in 2003.

"Even in our little cottage industry, businesses are growing by leaps and bounds," Isaacs said. She started alone six years ago and now has two people working with her and a third in training.

Her outlook has changed in her years on the job. "I used to go into clients' homes with a magic-wand mentality," she said. "Now I know it takes extreme patience. There's no quick fix. Being organized is the same as diet or exercise: You have to keep at it. The bottom line is that if you do the hard work, you get amazing results."

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