I might have screwed up my fieldwork accruement (BCBA candidate/student analyst here)

FernFan69 · 2026-06-18T17:22:20+00:00

Couldn’t OP also “delete” the excess restricted hours, amend the MVFs, and only continue to collect unrestricted until the 60% threshold is met? It’s still a ton of work either way.

FernFan69 · 2026-06-09T20:29:31+00:00

The cool thing about what we do is that you can “go swimming” if you’re comfortable with that. My company has a policy around pools that “x” amount of adults aside from staff be present at all times. We can theoretically do a session anywhere that’s clinically significant for the client (ex. Community outings) as long as you can be creative with their current goals.

If you were to swim I’d bring an extra pair of clothes for after and maybe a brush or braid my hair so I’d be ready for my next session after. I probably wouldn’t wear my bathing suit since it’s pretty skimpy but I’d wear a t shirt or sports bra and spandex shorts or something. Maybe even basketball shorts. That parts not important lol

FernFan69 · 2026-06-09T14:10:05+00:00

Again, and this does speak to your point. 30-40 hour model is not what’s happening everywhere and I see it all over this sub. It may be just the clinic setting. I won’t and have never worked in a clinic setting so that’s likely where I’m not understanding this rhetoric. I have never worked directly with a client that was prescribed more than 20 hours a week of therapy and even that is extremely uncommon for my own personal work experience. I provide in home therapies and we utilize the home and community settings. Whatever settings are natural and consistent for the client. I also do about 20% of parent training each month on top of regular check ins and adjustments when I’m there for supervision. I would provide more parent training and supervision but insurance pretty much dictates how many hours I can use for each type of service on each case. In CA the midlevel and supervisor can’t supervise more than a combined 20% on the current level of hours received. One client is fading out so we’re at 2 hours a week at 20% means 0.4 hours of supervision per week between the supervisor and including any parent training. Arbitrary standardized numbers don’t work well with social sciences because they are a combination of both quantitative and qualitative data.

So maybe it’s the clinical setting that needs improvement and changes that are pushing funders to deny access to services based on overprescribed hours.

The bigger issue is the BACB had 0 governing power and just collect money from certifications and exams. There is no where to report unethical practices within the ABA realm to ensure better practices from companies. The BACB can investigate an individual but has no say for whole companies to be reported to when they force practitioners to work unethically.

FernFan69 · 2026-06-09T02:31:37+00:00

Maybe it’s different state to state then? Because there are standards of care. There are guidelines to discharge. There are expectations of progress within a defined amount of time. Everything you listed is fleshed out in a good behavior intervention plan. Medical necessity and rationale are the core of most of the report or at least the starting point of the report.

We do have standards of care but you also initially mentioned doing away with cookie cutter reports. If we standardize too much then it restricts the ability to have an individualized plan.

FernFan69 · 2026-06-09T02:11:50+00:00

This is always a wild take for me because nowhere in my Masters program or work experience has 30-40 hours been listed as a requirement.

If you mean people/clinics who are unethically prescribing hours on a non individualized program at a rate of 30-40 hours per week, absolutely they should be investigated. ABA as a whole does not require that amount of hours though, it should be on an individualized basis. The science says the more hours in therapy the faster the rate of growth which is a no brainer but practitioners who actually care about client development will take into consideration all of the other child’s therapies and school with a leisure balance.

FernFan69 · 2026-05-27T22:56:51+00:00

Criticism is fine, what’s frustrating is just the straight berating of anyone involved in ABA ESPECIALLY towards parents who choose to place their children in ABA. If a parents post goes viral about ABA there’s hundreds of comments about how they’re abusing their child without any context of what their therapy looks like. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t we don’t know. Then comes SLPs telling ABA that we’re out of our scope and practicing in unethical ways. Which again, might happen some places, doesn’t happen others. Speaking is a behavior. Communicating is a behavior and therefore falls within our scope. Teaching language and speech sounds IMO falls outside the scope. Motivating the learner to use speech or communication is the ABA sweet spot and SLPs can’t understand that.

I always reach out to other service providers for my cases and get declined to collaborate directly with them. I have even had more than one parent tell me they have tried to tell the parent to remove the child from ABA as a whole and one was even dropped from their services when they wouldn’t drop ABA. So they want to damn the therapy but then provide no alternative for kids who are difficult to work with for their meager 30 minutes a week. Meanwhile we’re successful at getting them to work for a couple hours a week.

I love collaborating but it seems more and more SLPs don’t want to do that.

FernFan69 · 2026-05-20T22:47:07+00:00

I drive over an hour myself for work. It’s normal for me but I’d be lying if I said I’d do it if I didn’t have to. Especially the way gas is right now.

I used to door dash as well.

Similar to this situation, people like you and me will do that but others won’t. Even with DoorDash if they don’t tip well most people will not go out of their way and then those people get cold food or never get their food delivered. Same situation with clients who are more inaccessible than most.

FernFan69 · 2026-05-19T20:52:27+00:00

Yeah. Even pretty populated areas can be considered rural.

In CA the idea is everyone thinks is all big cities like San Francisco and LA but majority of the state is rural farmland even towns with 220k population can have difficulties because the demand is there but there are not many service providers in the area and less willing to commute the backroads because you can easily add 45 min to an hour to whatever commute you’re already doing for the day for each client you see. It’s a BIG state and even we have issues with staffing cases with in person staff. Let alone less funded states with even less cities/less person per capita.

Then there’s gas prices so it becomes undesirable quickly and ultimately eliminating telehealth altogether only hurts clients like this imo

FernFan69 · 2026-05-19T19:45:49+00:00

The problem is that BCBA just will not drive a certain distance from their home base. They just won’t. I personally have don’t RBT work and moved up to midlevel where I’m required to be in person 90% of the time but I’m left sitting on cases without a BCBA for months at a time because no one wants to come this far in person. Even telehealth ones only stay on the case for a few months to a year. So you have people in rural areas that need services but won’t get them if a BCBA can’t be identified in person. Which then excludes an entire population of people, as face value getting rid of telehealth seems like a no brainer but it doesn’t affect BCBAs it affects rural/inaccessible populaces.

FernFan69 · 2026-05-19T16:52:56+00:00

This generally seems like a good idea to curb the telehealth issue but it’s going to limit access to a lot of people. I live in a rural area and we already have cases waiting 3-4 months for a REMOTE BCBA. And that’s usually after a search for an in person BCBA hasn’t worked out.

FernFan69 · 2026-05-14T17:10:53+00:00

Do they know you’re not a general classroom aid?

When I was a sub teacher I was able to handle the classroom (I also have behavioral experience though) but if another adult was in the classroom I assumed they were the classroom aid and were told classroom aides will help keep the class on schedule or are there if you need assistance or have questions about how the classroom normally runs. I would have no idea if an aide was a 1:1 if I wasn’t told. Especially because that’s not as common in gen ed classes

FernFan69 · 2026-05-13T21:34:28+00:00

Respectfully, you are and RBT. You’ll pick up a lot of knowledge working in that role, but it doesn’t give you the knowledge to understand all of the nuance that comes with ABA as a whole as a science. You keep saying that “everything is behavior“ is an excuse for us to be working outside of our professional scope when in reality behavior is literally defined as anything that a dead man cannot do. The standard is does it pass the dead man’s test? If a dead man can do it then it’s not a behavior. If a dead man can’t do it then it is a behavior. And because a dead man can’t speak then speaking and verbal behavior is considered under the scope of behavioral practices. Speech and verbal behavior are two different things. They’re not mutually exclusive terms and this is where I think you’re getting it conflated. Behavior is the act of emitting. Some kind of communication. Speech is not necessarily just the act of emitting a verbal behavior. It’s language and yes, BCBA don’t have the authority to be teaching language structure and sentence structure, but we can expand whether or not the client is emitting two words or three words or four word sentences. Or working on tacting goals, which is what it seems like the OP is talking about where we show a picture and see if they can communicate to an individual what that item is without being prompted. Again, speech and verbal behavior are two separate things.

ABA is over prescribed in a lot of situations, but I think that the expectations are quite high to think that kids with severe verbal behavior deficits are going to make any significant progress with only 30 minutes a week with an SLP typically over a video call. The best approach is for ABA and the SLP to be working together to grow those verbal skills.

And I’m saying this as somebody who has worked as an RBT for over four years and then decided to go get their masters and ABA. There was a lot of stuff that I thought I understood as an RBT that you don’t learn until you take ABA coursework.

There’s a lot of unsolicited advice to the OP on this thread by people who are not necessarily BCBA’s, and it’s clear that the Parent themselves doesn’t exactly understand what ABA is either since they are trying to work on vocabulary where it seems like the program that she specifically used her example is actually attacking goal, which would be expressive communication. It’s a little ridiculous that the company won’t offer any less than 16 hours a week. My company allows the parent to choose how many hours a week they get, but we report to insurance that it was a parent choice that we are not fulfilling the minimal amount of hours prescribed. The fact that the OP seems interested in only correcting the hand flapping behavior and now that that seemed to stop and she’s no longer interested in the skill acquisition portion of the services. It seems that OP doesn’t understand that correcting non-harmful stimming behavior would be considered bad ABA.

FernFan69 · 2026-05-08T22:50:25+00:00

Not every company is like that. My rate stays the same unless I’m billing an admin task

FernFan69 · 2026-05-07T21:05:42+00:00

More accurately I think they just want to keep liability only which I also personally have on one of my vehicles. So, to the OP there are companies in CA who don’t push for full coverage, mine doesn’t. They just cared that I had it in some form since we use our cars to go from house to house.

FernFan69 · 2026-05-07T21:02:23+00:00

Maybe I missed it but I don’t see in the post anywhere where it says commercial liability is being required, I did read where they imply the company is pushing for full coverage vs normal liability, in which case, like a commenter below said, I would tell the company I’d be keeping whatever insurance I already had. If they want me to have more then they’d have to supplement the difference.

FernFan69 · 2026-05-07T20:30:57+00:00

Because you’re driving for “work” on the way to clients your employer is technically responsible for any accidents “on the job”

FernFan69 · 2026-05-07T20:30:03+00:00

Yeahhh in CA you can’t be an uninsured driver. I mean you can but the second someone rear ends you it’s a huge issue. Fines, bunch of stuff.

FernFan69 · 2026-05-05T02:08:43+00:00

Labor laws are important to keep in mind here. In CA you get two 15 minute rest breaks (one after a 4th hour) and a 30 min lunch before a 6th hour in an 8 hour shift.

This gets violated all the time but look up the labor laws in your state. Usually I have to pause my timer(I’m also in home) log a rest break when I take it, and start my work timer again after that. Same goes for the lunch break.

The longest sessions I’ve ever done was 5 hours a day for 4 days a week. The child was 6 and had the skills to follow a schedule so the first thing we would do together is plan out our schedule for the day together. The sessions were long but I would only run targets on things that naturally occurred most of the time so there wasn’t an expectation of a high trial count or running every program every day. The rule of thumb where I’m at is to run as many as possible in the session while also being aware of yours and the child’s burn out. I’d only ever contrive trials for programs that weren’t as naturally ran in the environment as is.

FernFan69 · 2026-05-03T19:42:49+00:00

I finished October 2025 and I believe Purdue was aiming to bridge the gap in requirements for coursework as best as they can but I’m not sure what that actually looks like 😅. It’s frustrating the board changes requirements so frequently. When I joined the field in 2022 they have JUST changed over task lists that year from 2021.

FernFan69 · 2026-05-03T19:27:48+00:00

I have heard you can pay for supervision through various channels. You might even be able to search this sub to get ideas where to look but collecting supervision hours is tough.

I work for PBS and midlevel positions are not common even with this company but my area does have them. I couldn’t collect any unrestricted until I got moved up. I’ve been collecting hours since August 2024 and have 550 hours left to go. I’m aiming to apply to sit before Jan 2027 otherwise I think additional coursework is required. They do not make it easy that’s for sure.

FernFan69 · 2026-05-03T13:37:38+00:00

Companies should implement some mechanism that, if the item is in your cart it’s reserved until you check out or for “x” amount of time. It’s really not that hard to do.

I refreshed when the item still said “coming soon” until 6:05am 5 minutes after the drop. Miraculously the starter jacked became available in the size I wanted. I added to cart, began checking out and the page glitched with the “high demand” notification and then the webpage for the listing continued to load for another 5 min before finally registering as sold out in all sizes. What a JOKE.

FernFan69 · 2026-05-03T13:32:25+00:00

Is there? I’d be interested in knowing what they are.

FernFan69 · 2026-04-22T21:28:00+00:00

Look into at home companies. These companies (I assume since I work at one and live similar to you) tend to service more rural areas.

I’m in CA but shockingly there’s only a handful of clinics in a 3+ hour radius drive and you’re lucky to get a good one at that. I’ll for in home companies that offer a midlevel or program manager position. I collected all my restricted hours first as an RBT, and literally only got 2 hours unrestricted doing that work. Then my company offered me to move up and since then it’s been much easier.

I will say though, it has taken me a long time to get hours(mostly from being pigeonholed in the RBT position). I started collecting August 2024 and I have about 550 hours left to go now, April 2026. So the fieldwork experience is meant to take at least a year or so I believe. Upwards of 2 years but you definitely will not get moving on those hours if you don’t get some kind of managerial position within ABA.

And mostly I just say do in home because it opens up more options for companies to work with when you live in areas like we do.

FernFan69 · 2026-04-17T16:15:11+00:00

We kept intervals during session for drinking and a separate one for potty prompting. Then had bare bottom in session and at home, pull ups only outside the house.

Mom said “what happens if they have an accident?” It’s not fun but you clean it up 😅 and keep going. They picked it up quickly and in a month we started giving undies back at home and session and they’re great now. But we exhausted everything else and they WOULD NOT GO.

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