They’ve got an exclusive license to nit pick – and with increased reports of lice breakouts in public and private schools, this pair of nit pickers are in high demand to help head off the problem.

Just two years ago, Adie Horowitz, a mother of four from Brooklyn, and Dr. Robert Schachter, a psychiatrist in Manhattan with a specialty in sleep disorders, were in competition for big money contracts to remove the tiny bloodsuckers from children’s heads.

Now the two have combined forces as one company called Licenders and are leading the charge to spot and eradicate the pesky parasites.

“They’re really the only game in town,” said Emily Armstrong, the president of the parent-teacher association at one Manhattan school, New Explorations in Science, Technology, and Math. The school spent about $5,000 last year alone on Licenders. The parent association asks parents to chip in $10 a child to help pay the bill.

More than 100 public and private schools in the New York area use the company, which recently opened an offshoot in Israel.

While the city Department of Education maintains a “no-nit policy” in schools, it does not provide funding to hire groups like Licenders, so only schools with parent associations that can afford the bill are able to hire lice checkers. Some schools rely on parent volunteers.

Licenders typically dispatches about half a dozen clinicians, sporting white lab coats and armed with magnifying lamps, to schools to pick through hair for a fee of $2 for each student examined.

The company employs a team of about 20 who are mostly trained beauticians. No special certification is needed.

When a clinician finds a nit or egg, she places it on a piece of tape as proof to parents who often can’t believe their child is infested. The lice look like little dark spots and are difficult to get rid of in young children since they pass the critters back and forth to each other in school. “We really try to be discrete,” Ms. Horowitz said this week during an interview in Dr. Schachter’s East Side office. “We don’t want to embarrass the kids, they are usually so petrified that they will have it.”

Parents are also petrified because the process of getting rid of lice can be costly and frustrating. In past years, parents relied on potent shampoos now frowned upon because of their strong chemical content. Research also shows some lice have become resistant to those chemicals.

The company advertises home visits for $250 that include delousing family members as well as vacuuming rugs, cleaning pillows, and tossing stuffed animals.

For years, Ms. Horowitz operated her own business known as Lice Advice out of her home in Flatbush, Brooklyn. She got started working on her four children and then realized the business potential.

At the same time, Dr. Schachter, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, started Licenders with a team of nit pickers. He got the idea when patients came to him complaining that they were unable to sleep because their children’s lice were driving them crazy.

Before starting Licenders, Dr. Schachter’s other business endeavors included creating a video to help people suffering from insomnia. He later served as the press spokesman for Dial-A-Mattress, one of the nation’s leading sellers of bedding.

Licenders uses its own special products that it bills as being free of harsh chemicals. It also sells, for $60, a home kit with a detangling cream and a silver-colored fine-toothed comb.

“Every parent should be able to clean out the lice of a child,” Ms. Horowitz said. “What a vulnerable feeling when you can’t.”

While Licenders has cornered the Manhattan and Westchester lice market, a woman in Brooklyn named Abigail Rosenfeld has earned renown in the battle against lice for the past 18 years.

The mother of 13, Ms. Rosenfeld honed her skills as a teenager as she helped her mother remove nits from her brothers and sisters. She has gained such fame that earlier this year a pediatrician from Boston flew into the city with her children to Ms. Rosenfeld because nobody had been able to rid her children of nits.

Some parents come to her horrified after trying home remedies of mayonnaise, kerosene, or Raid.

Ms. Rosenfeld has also cornered the market of Orthodox Jewish schools, and Licenders tends to leave those schools to her.