Ep. 52: BCBA in Schools vs. Clinics – Pros, Cons, and What to Expect

Join us as we break down the pros and cons of being a BCBA in a school vs. clinic setting, covering collaboration, job stability, workload, and more!

🔑 Key Takeaways
✅ Team Collaboration Matters – Schools often provide a built-in multidisciplinary team (SLPs, OTs, teachers, etc.), while clinics may have fewer collaboration opportunities.
✅ Family Involvement Differs – Clinics typically have more direct parent involvement due to insurance requirements, while schools rely on IEP meetings and teacher communication.
✅ Job Stability & Work-Life Balance – Schools offer predictable schedules, summers off, and union protections, while clinics can have more flexibility but higher burnout potential.
✅ Paperwork & Caseloads – Clinics may have intense insurance-driven documentation, while schools balance IEPs, FBAs, and larger caseloads.
✅ Making an Impact – Schools allow for systemic change across students and staff, while clinics often focus on intensive, individualized progress.

📚 Resources and Ideas
📌 ABAI & Autism NJ Conferences – Professional development opportunities for BCBAs in schools and clinics.
📌 Licensure & Certification Considerations – Some schools require dual certification (e.g., special education or school psychology).
📌 Work-Life Balance & Pay – Important factors to research when considering a BCBA role in either setting.

Join Us...
🎙 Next Episode: Step 10 of the FBA mini-series -- Teaching replacement behaviors
🌟 Subscribe: Don’t miss upcoming episodes on practical strategies and must-have resources for behavior support!
📢 Share this episode with a teacher, BCBA, or administrator looking for fresh approaches to special education and behavior analysis!
💬 Get Involved: Share your ideas in our Facebook group or tag us on social media. @TheMisfitBehaviorists
📚 Connect: Follow us for more tips, tools, and discussions about all things behavior and education.  

Join the Facebook group for collaboration and freebies: The Misfit Behaviorists

😍 More, you say? We’re here for you!

• Apple podcast | The Misfit Behaviorists
• Instagram | @‌themisfitbehavioristspodcast
• YouTube | @‌themisfitbehaviorists

👋 Find us!

• Audra | ABA in School
• Caitlin | Beltran’s Behavior Basics
• Sami | B.A.S.S.

🖱️ Rate, Review, Like & Subscribe so you don’t miss an episode! Showing this love helps us get out to more educators out there!

Transcript

Ep. 52: BCBA in Schools vs. Clinics – Pros, Cons, and What to Expect 

[00:00:00] when I was in the clinical model, having kind of an open door policies, like you guys can come in and talk about anything, any case, any time. And I made sure that I was going around the clinic and popping in on everybody's sessions as much as I could as well. But as the clinics grow, and there gets to be more people, and then you kind of lose touch with that, and that's definitely a con for clinical. 

Welcome to the Misfit Behaviorist Podcast. Join your hosts, Audra Jensen and Caitlin Beltran, here to bring you evidence based strategies with a student centered focus. Let's get started. 

Hey, welcome back to the Misfit Behaviorists. This week, we thought we would talk about something I've seen a lot of questions and discussions about recently, and that is kind of the pros and cons of being a BCBA in a clinic setting and in a school setting. So, what I did, Caitlin, is I took just like, 15 quick points that came to mind, and I jotted them all down, well, jotted them, you know, on a computer, I jotted them down, and then I shuffled them, and then let me share my screen, because we're going [00:01:00] to just do this together. 

Alright, so what we'll do is I'll just open this up to the very first one, which is Team collaboration and wraparound services. And so as I was thinking about it in this one, I was thinking, okay, that's a really nice advantage of being in the school is because you not just have your other BCBAs, which are all fantastic people, but then you also have a team of the SLP, the OT, the PT, the teacher, the gen ed, the peers, the counselor. Everybody right there working under one roof, and that's pretty rare. It does happen in clinical settings, but I've seen that most beneficial in kind of a school setting. What have you seen? 

Yes, 100 percent the same. I definitely felt more of an island when I was in a clinic model. It's so funny that that came up because today, a private BCBA was coming in to observe one of our students and she and I have a great relationship. So I do like that aspect that when I was working for the clinics, I don't feel like we were doing a lot of that crossover and collaboration, like from the home to the clinic setting. But anyway, she kind [00:02:00] of she goes, can I ask you a personal question? And I was like, sure. And she goes, why do you choose to work for a school when you could do this? And I think to her, it was like the making your own hours, the flexibility. But to me, working on that team is such a huge part of what I do, and I love that. 

Yeah, I worked with one clinic only, out of all the clinics that I've been at least involved in, that had an SLP on staff. And I had one other one that had an OT part time. But that is really rare. And there's so much that we can gain from other professionals in the field about the specific student and then we're working, not just with that team, we're working with the family team. It's just that, it's just that whole wraparound services, you get so much better in a school setting than I've seen in clinic. 

Yes, and I will say there's a lot of, I mean, there's a ton of agencies near where I live, and I've seen that more and more where they have speech therapists on staff, not anything beyond that, maybe an OT or something here and there, but I don't think that they're using them the way that the school does. So they're not holding the joint meetings we are or doing. 

That's true. 

They're [00:03:00] there, but it's still very segmented. Like, they get tuesdays and then speech on Wednesdays or something like that. 

Yeah, yeah, that's true. Okay, for at least for me, I would say this is better in a school environment. 

Oh, yes, I agree. 

So the next one having family involvement So what do you think on this one? 

So this one's tough because I think for me personally when I was working in a clinic I was going to the family home as that was the setting that we were primarily doing the ABA therapy in. So the family was there all the time. I had more access to them, but still depending on the family was whether or not they were involved or not and participating in session as we wanted them to be. So I think by default, we get more face time with the family or I found when I was working in clinics but in the school we have those more regular meetings and contacts. So this one's a tough one for me. 

For me, I was thinking, at least in insurance land now, there are absolutely requirements of doing face to face times with your families, at least monthly, which I never got in school [00:04:00] except for the high flyers or the IEP meetings or something like that. Some communication back and forth, depending on the family and the teachers and stuff, but I found in the clinic having the family involved, either you're going into the homes and you have that, like you talked about, Or you're just required by insurance to have more family meetings. So I personally would say definitely better for me with the family involvement, especially when you also think about school, everybody goes to school, you know, in a clinic model, it's like you have families who are seeking out your services specifically. And so they tend to be more involved in what's going on where I've worked with a lot of families in schools who just put their kids on the bus and that's it. And so that's kind of hard to do when you have, especially when you have a very difficult situation. I personally would probably put this under clinic. 

Yeah, I agree. 

Next professional development. What do you think of that? 

For me, hands down school one, because we're kind of learning from each other going back to that team collaboration, but also, the family involvement for a clinic, I feel like [00:05:00] is the PD for school because we're required to sign off on like faculty meetings, team meetings, you can't go through a day ending in "y" without a meeting of some sort plus , at least my district, we get some built in PD expenses, like, I can go to autism New Jersey. I can go to ABA-I once a year. They'll help me pay for that. Through a clinic, for me personally, that was a little bit harder to get them to pay for anything like that, that I needed to renew my cert for. 

They do allow some, at least in this area, some amount of money and then you can spend it any way you want. Is that how you guys have it? I don't think we'd ever been given enough money to actually go to a decent conference. 

I'm lucky in the district I'm in now that we get allocated within our contract X amount of dollars for PD per year and it would cover about like the cost of one conference. But again, I just work for a very understanding district where they'll say, like, I last year said, oh, I also want to go to new Jersey ABA or whatever it's called, NJABA. And I was like, I'll pay for it out of pocket, if I could take a [00:06:00] professional day and they're like, Oh no, we're going to pay for that. That looks really important. You need those credits. 

Wow. 

Yeah, that's really nice. The only thing I like about the clinic is just that it is ABA Specific, but then, like you said, it's like, then you are sort of pigeonholed , and it's most of the stuff they talk about is clinical model. When you go to some of these big ABA conferences, it's like, I really had to cherry pick when I'd switch from clinical to school. I had to really cherry pick which ones I wanted were school based because they were harder to find. 

Yes. 

So, yeah, I think I would say also here, I'll put it like right here, mostly school, but at least as far as what I've seen, ABA specific stuff has some really nice research based stuff that we don't get as much in the school based stuff. 

Job stability is the next one. What do you think of that? 

This one, I really think it depends on where you're in and or what clinic you're in. The only thing I will say is that, yes, we need a lot of special ed teachers, but we [00:07:00] get a ton of applicants, for example, in the school I work for, teachers. So it's not like that job is yours. If you're going for a self contained teacher spot by no means, whereas in a clinic, I just feel like they're always hiring at least the ones near me because they're exploding and population wise. So I know when I left, Partly because they wanted us to take on more and more cases. And I wasn't doing that for my full time job. I was doing that as an aside. And I couldn't keep up with the demands that they wanted me to work.

You said it perfectly. I think it's job stability. I think you're going to always have a job if you go into the clinic. I just can't imagine anybody not being able to find a job in the state of things. The advantage of school is you generally, at least most places, do have a union or some sort of protection that is a little bit harder to get rid of you, but then there's kind of a dual edged sword. Then you have teachers sticking around that maybe do need to move on. Yeah, I would probably say right in the middle. 

Okay, talk about kind of a variety of cases. I was thinking about this kind of [00:08:00] in a clinical model, you're almost always dealing with, I mean, 98 percent of the time we're dealing with autism. It's just kind of what is, there were some different things that we've had over the years, but primarily what insurance pays is autism therapy. In the school, it's kind of fun to be able to expand your horizon, your tool belt to work with lots of disabilities, to work with students who don't have disabilities, who just need support. I kind of really like that. I mean, in the one way you're, you really hone in your skills and you can become really good at this, but then in the other way, you kind of have this diversity of tools, which is kind of, so it's like, depends on what you like.

Yeah, that's true. I definitely feel like my eyes were opened a lot because I worked at a private school strictly for students with severe autism, and then when I went to public school, I learned so much like back in those early days for me, just about other disabilities and other diagnoses and other classifications like ADHD, emotional regulation, [00:09:00] oppositional defiant disorder. Everything. And so some of that I'm just fascinated by, and I continue to love working with those populations, but I also could apply some of that knowledge to my students with autism that I learned. 

Yeah. And that's exactly what I was going to say is a lot of the stuff that I learned by working with new students, new disabilities and things I wasn't familiar with, I then was able to use, Oh, wow. You know, our down syndrome kids have this stubborn streak that is awesome. I really learned how to deal with the stubborn actions and how to wait out and be patient. And like, Oh, you know what? This is a skill set. That's really good for these kids too.

Next one, stress and mental health. 

Oh, can we tie? I think it just really depends on your personality and I'm glad we're doing this because I think hopefully this will help people decide which setting is better for them. Because again, for me personally, working in a school, they're both stressful, don't get me wrong, a hundred percent, but school, maybe just cause I'm so used to it. I like the team collaboration. I feel supported that way. I like having those little built in holidays and summer breaks to look forward to. So I think just my [00:10:00] personality syncs more with like that school environment. And I do think I would be more stressed working in a clinic where I was a solo team of one most of the time just not getting some of those same benefits that I've come to enjoy. So I don't know. 

I think one of the things we're going to talk about under these cards, I think there is one on scheduling and stuff, which we're going to come back to, when I think about stress of a clinic and stress of a school and the two different places that I've worked in now, granted, most of my time in the clinic was running the clinic, so that adds the stress, but having the stress of, insurance mandates and reports that have to be in at a certain time and they have to look a certain way and you have Insurance companies coming back and they're saying this doesn't work. We're not going to approve this, meeting certain billable hours, Certain requirements on time that you have to do there. I found the stress in the clinic definitely higher mental health. I saw many more practitioners burnout in a clinic setting than I do in school. I mean, we see burnout everywhere. That's just if you're [00:11:00] not taking care of yourself, that's going to happen. But I definitely saw more in the clinic. Now, granted, when we first started, you know, 25 years ago, I probably would say the other way around, because when we started clinicals, there was no guidelines on anything, and so even when the insurance companies started paying, they're like, just, we don't know what we're doing, so just do whatever you want and bill whatever you want. And it was great. There were no mandates of required amounts of reports or how often. It was just like, whatever you want to do, we trust you. And then things changed. And so I would say 10 or 15 years, it's switch the other way. Now, schools , it's not a more relaxed, it's a different kind of stress. It's definitely stressful, and I'm seeing caseloads get higher and higher over the school model now, which is what we saw in the clinical model. So, who knows? I guess it sort of goes back and forth and back and forth over time anyway. 

I would add too, I think depending on really the area of the country you're in, because I'm in New Jersey, we're so densely populated. We have great schools, but which also means like we have really [00:12:00] involved, invested parents, and they can be very litigious. And in my experience, if they don't like the clinic, they're going to move on to another clinic. But if they don't like the school, there's potential for, you know, them to get litigious. 

Very good point there. Stress and mental health. I'll put it right here.

Paperwork. So this I was thinking, okay, clinical you have, like I talked about, reports and all those requirements, and then in the school setting you have IEPs and FBAs and stuff, and I'm thinking at least for me, the amount of paperwork depends on your caseloads. So, like, if you have, 12 cases that you're in charge of in a clinic and you're required to do one every six months, you can span those out and be very systematic about when you have them planned out. And then it's not so bad. It's when they all happen at once that gets really stressful. In schools, you have your once a year IEP for every student, but you may have, you know, 30 cases. And so you're in charge of being a part of each of those IEPs. And even if you're not the case manager, you have to be a [00:13:00] part of it. Then if you're required to do, you know, FBAs, those each individual FBA can take so much time. And so it kind of depends on the amount of caseloads you have and requirements on your funding source too. 

I feel like you were saying with the requirements of clinics changing with insurance catching up. I've heard a lot of people in clinic settings say, like, they will do the first round of paperwork and then catch their breath and turn around and it feels like the next one's due. Whereas in the school, if you have a higher caseload, you're doing paperwork nonstop across the board, but at least you can have a longer span of time in between a progress report, which is like quarterly or an IEP, which is once a year. 

Some of the clinics now are using, most of them now are using digital databases for goals, trackings, and everything, and they also include report writing. And so some of those templates make it a lot easier than they were when we started. When we started, we just basically had to write everything or type, you know, everything from the beginning. But some of the templates they're using make it a lot more streamlined and easier to do.

So schedule, this is the next one, schedule work [00:14:00] life balance. I definitely, for me, would say 100 percent school. I mean, just without even thinking about it, just the work life balance of working in a school and being able to work at least mostly school hours. I mean, the type of people we are either go early or stay late. Most of the ones that I've worked with have the same days off that your kids do, or at least similarly, or at least have one month in the year that you have off. So I just find that that schedule is so much easier to make that work life balance. 

Right. At first, I thought you were going to say clinic because if you could schedule your hours, sort of like how you wanted them, but I don't know 

that it's so rare, I guess if you put yourself part time and you decide on your hours or you create your own business, you're not running for somebody else and you just create it. That takes a lot of work, though, but as far as I worked in both settings, the work life balance in school, I found to be way easier to come up with. 

The next one is dealing with higher ups and I meant in a school setting your admin [00:15:00] and then in a clinic setting your clinic managers, operation managers or whoever you're dealing with. So what do you feel as far as pros and cons to school and clinic there? 

I feel like I definitely am in communication with higher ups way more in a school setting role. I guess it's depending on how you look at it, like if you have a bad boss that you don't like, then it's going to be a negative for school. If you like your supervisor, boss or admin, it's going to be a positive. I just felt either way in the clinic setting. This could be just the nature of the clinic, I was in, but I never really saw anyone higher up, unless it was like time for something that was due. And then even then I would get feedback on, if something was late or if it's due earlier or something like that. But I never got feedback on how the quality of my work was. That was something I really missed because I started working in a school where we had so many layers of supervision. I wasn't used to almost just being trusted to be on my own. And I wanted to make sure somebody who could be cross checking me. I felt like that would have been helpful once in a while. 

Yeah, that's interesting. I think what my [00:16:00] experience was, In a clinic model, at least you have, you have your bosses or whatever who at least speak the lingo and kind of know we're kind of all on the same track. And that's the challenge I've had with schools is getting them to understand what we do and why it's important and getting that piece of it. Being on the clinical model, then the kind of the cons are you tend to have the higher up you go, the more focus you are on the fiscal needs, and making sure billable hours are met and that's the most important and getting your hours, and then you kind of lose that touch with the therapy that we're doing, and I find that's less a problem in the school environment. And I think, like you said, it really comes down to the person that's in charge of you. If you have a good relationship and when I was in the clinical model, having kind of an open door policies, like you guys can come in and talk about anything, any case, any time. And I made sure that I was going around the clinic and popping in on everybody's sessions as much as I could as well. But as the clinics grow, and there gets to be more people, and then you kind of lose touch with [00:17:00] that, and that's definitely a con for clinical.

Next one, let's see. Case loads.

Oh the only thing I will say is, again, not that it always works out so perfectly, but in the clinics, it's my understanding, you can not cherry pick maybe your cases, but you can say no to cases, or if you feel like you've met your quota. 

Oh, I don't know. 

No? 

In a clinic, I think if you are a smaller clinic or you're on your own, then yeah, totally. I think so many of these clinics are just getting bigger and bigger and bigger. I mean, ours did. In fact, it got so big, I couldn't do any more. 

Full time staff, or did you have people coming in and taking per case? 

Full time staff, yeah. Once in a while, I would have a part time clinician, but for the most part, it was full time salaried. And initially it was kind of just fill your hours. And then as time went on, it was like, you need to take this number of cases. And then once we sold our company to a bigger company. Once they came in, they had [00:18:00] much more stringent, like you have to meet this number of hours, you have to have this number of cases. And that was when I sort of cut ties and went, no, I don't do that. But yeah, there's a lot of pressure, especially in these bigger clinics to have a big caseload and a certain number of billable hours. And, and it's just, that's really stressful. But of course, on the flip side in schools, I mean, you may be a BCBA, you may be the only BCBA in your entire district and they keep giving you cases because they have so many and you may have a caseload of, you know, 40 kids that you may not be seeing them like you do in a clinic model. You may be only checking in or being on consult or something like that. Yeah. But you still have to know all 40 of those kids, and so there's that kind of that piece of it, too, and the clinic model, you know all of your kids really well, you may have a smaller caseload, but there's so many hours that you put into that that that really balloons into direct services. And that's a whole difficulty. But then, you know, in the schools, you could have tons of kids. You need to know them all. 

Right, you do. Sometimes I feel like my head is spinning [00:19:00] because I'm at one building Monday, different building Tuesday, a different building Wednesday. And then I kind of circle back. And like you said, I just have to remind myself sometimes, like I'm not responsible for delivering that whole program myself, like it would be in another setting. But I do still need to be involved. And so sometimes it's like, what day is it? Which kid am I seeing? Or which teacher am I working with today? 

Yeah, a lot of the clinics near me still have opportunities for what's the word I'm looking for? Not per diem, but like for BCBAs to come in and take some cases. So I think it depends on the clinic too. 

Independent contractor, I guess. You brought up something that made me think. So I did not add in here, but the difference between working in a clinic model who is going to homes and one who is an all clinic based. And I don't know if you've worked in both types of settings, but I would say, at least for the stress level, I enjoyed much, much more working in a clinic based setting than working in the homes. I mean, there's advantages to working at homes, but I'm telling you, we had so many more problems with staffing with difficult [00:20:00] situations in home environments just being able to control an environment in a home setting as much as I wanted to go in there more often as far as collaboration, but working, I found better progress in a clinic setting than in a home setting. And of course, you're going to have kids who need to work on skills in the home setting and there's obviously you need to do that and community settings as well. You need to generalize all the skills, but as far as progress of goals and stuff, I saw much better success working in clinic models.

I feel as if a lot of the clinic models near me offer home based services and clinic based services, but it always winds up that all of the families that go end up somehow in the clinic and I get it because like you said, it's easier and it's more controlled and you're seeing that progress. But working with families who the toilet training or the feeding or the dressing, it just really has to be done in the home. And I will say [00:21:00] that I've seen some really good models where the clinic, the BCBA, the director, whoever will say, you know, for this, for the goals we're working on, I'd really recommend a home setting and I've seen them not do that. And I think there becomes like a slippery slope because I get it. If you're a BCBA or a therapist, you can bill kind of back to back working in the clinic, whereas if you're going to the home and then driving to another home, it becomes just logistically harder, but I do fear that that's something we're losing with the explosion of clinics, is that they're all gravitating toward that clinic based services, and we're losing that really valuable Home based service time where the kids can work on those skills and the parents can be trained to do that too.

I think you make a really good point and I can absolutely see that. I wonder and I thought about this over the years that if an ideal situation would be a mod podge of both of them. The biggest challenges that I had running a clinic and having people going into the homes was more therapist based behavior techs going into the homes when they weren't really [00:22:00] trained to deal with some of the situations you see in the homes and the situations. I had one family who had a nanny cam and caught somebody doing something they shouldn't have been doing, you know, there's stuff like that going on. But you have these really young 18, 19, 20 year olds who don't have life experience going into these homes and some of the really challenging situation. So I wonder if the BCBA, like, once a month was in there, overlapping with them, making sure things were happening, working on those skills that really, you're right, have to be done in the home. It's just some sort of hybrid model that we need. We've swung from full home based all the way to full clinic based, and we need to find that balance in between.

Yes, but I know I can speak to that pain point of like when I was BCBA supervising homebound cases, and I would go once a month, but the therapist would go sometimes, well, I would go say twice a month, and they would go twice or three times a week, and I felt like I was constantly playing catch up, just trying to like learn what happened in the visits between, and it was hard for me to do that training with the staff because they were going so [00:23:00] much more than I did, and like you said, they weren't always getting the training up front that again models have changed like hopefully there's more layers of supervision and training available in these clinics now but this is where also just the young kids new to the field and the parents were like pull up a chair we're about to eat dinner and it's like lines 

Yeah there's that and they're asking them questions and they feel obligated to answer when it's really not their role to answer those questions is we really had to train the techs to say, okay, hey, that's a great question. Let me take that back to the BCBA and she will get back to you. But that took a lot of time to get people to understand the importance of doing that. 

I feel like would be ideal like, maybe you start in the clinic. Everyone gets trained on the team together and then you sort of venture out into the home and tackle one goal at a time or something like that. 

All right, next one is maintaining ethics. And what I was thinking about with this, I'm thinking I've had much more difficulty getting an organization to understand our ethical boundaries in the school environment because they're different than what they're used to. So they may be fine with having [00:24:00] consults on cases where they haven't talked to the families because they're part the school environment or, having dual relationships seems to happen all the time in the schools. I found that to be a little bit more challenging in school. In clinic where everybody there is, you know, BCBA or an RBT, they've all maintained the same type of ethical standards that we have. And so I find it's a little bit easier to have everybody understanding it in the clinical model. What have you seen? 

So the only thing I will say is just speaking up to my last point about being in that home setting is so tough. And again, I think I'm dating myself because my experience with clinic is kind of, I didn't work with anybody who was an RBT when I was in the clinic world. I don't even know if it was around then. So I was getting a lot of people that were like, oh, I want to try this as a part time job, and they didn't have much experience or training. I had a couple of really interesting scenarios early on where not so much with myself, but again, that tech who was going 2 or 3 times a week was seen as a support person by the family. The family was asking them to do things like, well, we're going to [00:25:00] take a ride to Walmart. Like, can you come and like help in the car? And it's like, well, wait, we don't have any goals for like a community outing yet. And with just some boundaries being blurred at the dad was just step out for 20 minutes. I'll be right back. And just a lot of things that like, depending on the family too and the tech and everybody involved, I just think once you're outside of that actual clinic space if you are working for a clinic that's going to home cases, that can be a little dicey. 

I think you're a hundred percent correct on that. I think the ethics and the situations that I've dealt with have been more prevalent in the home setting than anywhere else. More I think about it. Yeah, absolutely. It's just easier to blur those lines. Like you said, situations come up that they don't know how to deal with, being invited to birthday parties, you know, and stuff like that, receiving gifts.

Family is over from out of town and you're meeting all the family. And now you're getting, I mean, I had a family years ago, they were having marital problems and then the mom left. I mean, that could happen anywhere. But then the dad asked the tech, like, well, [00:26:00] if she gives you her new phone number, can you give it to me? And it's like, oh my gosh, I couldn't even imagine a world where a parent would feel comfortable asking. that just wouldn't happen in a school that I've worked at. Like no one would have gotten that close to say, oh yeah, like you know me well enough to pass on that number that I'm not supposed to have. Right. 

Yeah. We even had a couple of sketchy fathers making advances type of thing, they're just uncomfortable, or even if it wasn't an advance, it was just sort of creepy. So yeah, you're right, that is something you have to be aware of in a home environment. It happens in clinics too. But definitely, more opportunities in a home environment there.

How about pay? What do you think about pay?

I don't think I can comment because I've never worked full time for a clinic. 

When I think about pay, I think the advantage in the school is just you have all that extra time off you get in the summer and the weeks. Although I will say that I would only think about half of the BCBAs that I've worked in the districts, half of them go on a full year schedule, kind of like the [00:27:00] admins do, you know, where at least around here, the admins have summers they work as well, except for one month, and the BCBAs in a couple of districts here are on that schedule, but of course, they're paid higher than the BCBAs who are on the teacher's schedule, but they also get the extra time off. So that kind of depends. And then in a clinic model, if you're on a salary, you're getting your benefits and stuff as well. If you're on hourly, you have a much higher pay, but then you have to qualify with your own insurance and your own liability insurance and all this other things. The hourly, like, if you happen to have a home where your spouse or your partner has really good insurance, and you want to just create your own hours, you can accept a much higher billable hour. If you're really good, you're able to just do billable hours and you get a really high rate for that. And then you can get your reports done on your own time. So there's all these different models that you can do. So I think you have to investigate. You can't just look at it as apples to apples. They really are all different. 

Yes, and you have to take into account if you [00:28:00] are doing more of an independent contractor style , your taxes are going to look different. So it's definitely not apples to apples for sure. 

Yeah, so I would think if you're investigating to make sure you get all those pieces that you find out what your hourly rate is Or if your salary how much that is going to be what's your insurance, how good is the insurance, if they just say well we provide insurance. Well, does it have a really high deductible? It's looking into that. Do you offer retirement. Do you offer a match in your retirement? So all these other little pieces. In school, it's really easy because everything's, you know, posted. You can go and see exactly what the salary schedule is. I really like that about the schools, is you can see exactly what your education level is, how many years you've been, this is what you're going to get paid, the next year you're going to get paid this. I like that. So it's just, I think doing your research and your homework, whatever offer you're getting.

I wonder in clinics, are you able to negotiate anymore? I know in school, that's really, it's just not done. And like you said, it's very formulaic with our teacher scales and things. 

Every clinic situation I've been in, [00:29:00] yes. I would say that, at least as the owner, you have to be a little bit careful because as you negotiate, you have ones coming in and say, how come she gets this and I have this much? And I'm like, well, we had a different negotiation at the time that we did with you. And so you have to answer some of those hard questions. But yeah, I think still there's a negotiation that can happen. Like you mentioned, clinics are just always needing people anyway. 

I don't know if anyone's ever tried to negotiate their salary in a public school, but it does not go over well. But sometimes you get those friends who aren't in education and they're like, oh, can you negotiate? It's like, no. 

Or you go into a district who's never hired a BCBA, which is what we had initially. And they just did not know where to put you on the pay scale , you come in with all these years of experience, but you don't have teaching years of experiences. So they can't put you on this schedule. But they can't really put you on the admin schedule because the least here, not yet, there was no licensure with the state to be able to be considered. So there was this whole thing. So, yeah, there's [00:30:00] definitely things going on.

That's another point. A lot of the schools before the licensure was coming into play, which is still kind of like in limbo, I am a certified special ed teacher, and a lot of schools do prefer that you have some kind of some certificate, whether you're also a school psych or also a teacher, so I would say too to investigate that because you don't want to be putting all your eggs in one basket and then thinking you could have your pick of all these school based jobs when they might not be looking for somebody unless they're duly certified. 

I know one of the local districts here, when they first started hiring BCBAs, again, this was years ago, they didn't know where to put them. So they put them on the admin schedule, which was a much higher pay. And then a few years down the road, they had to change it and they bumped them back to the certificated. And so that's challenging too is because they don't know what to do. If you think about it, if you have a district who's just starting to use BCBAs, helping them understand the type of education and experience that we need to go through is no different than the [00:31:00] psychologist and the counselor and all, they really should be looking at them on this scale instead of just the certificated schedules.

All right, next one, making an impact. 

I feel like we need to just make a 3rd column that says it just depends and put them all up. 

They kind of are. 

I feel like at a school, we talked about how, though it takes a little bit longer to see some of those global changes across the board, but that's so awesome and rewarding when you do just in terms of like, not just one student, but you start looking at change in terms of like, staff behavior and systemic. 

The school and I really do love that. I mean, I have had great experiences working in a clinic or like the private school. I was at where I worked with very few students, but with very severe, significant autism. And when they made any amount of progress, it was so rewarding and it was so huge. 

I think for me, that is right down the middle. I've seen families, their goal was to be able to go out to dinner with their kid. That was it. And to be able to get that and to go to dinner for the first time. [00:32:00] It's just that's so amazing. And then you're not just impacting that learner. You're doing the whole family unit. That's so rewarding and you're kind of displaced a little bit in a school setting because you just work with the learner there and then families over there. So I really enjoy that piece of it. But at the same time, like you mentioned, being able to make systemic changes in a school district to start seeing all the teachers doing something, and making an impact with all the learners. 

Or like my school we have a inclusion preschool. So, if you are working with students from very young, some of those changes, my gosh, working with kids who are 3 or 4 engaging in physical behaviors, defiance, all practically nonverbal and seeing them a couple of years down the road, just like blending into that gen ed classroom, that's amazing. 

And then the flip side, you know, I've had clinic kiddos start at, you know, 18 months, two years, and we had them until they're adults. I mean, to see that, which I guess if you're in a school, you would see them throughout that whole time, but you don't usually get that for so long. And that's really fun. All right, in the [00:33:00] middle. 

We talked about controlling the environment already to make meaningful change. I think that kind of depends on your environment and what you're working on. I find that in a school setting where you have a classroom of 20 kids, it's much harder to control that environment. If you have a student that needs a certain thing, to make that happen is more tricky in a school environment. 

Right. You don't have that sterile environment where you're not in control of so many of those variables. Like, so many kids laughing. If one kid makes a joke inappropriately. 

At the same time, they need to learn to do that. 

It's sometimes good because you're teaching in the real world. 

The opportunities for generalizations and maintenance of skills so much better in a school environment. You just have so many more opportunities to do that than you do in a clinic or even a home setting.

Funding sources. I was thinking this one in particular, like I said, early on, it was parents were paying and, if they ran out of money, they ran out of money. That's one thing, but then the insurance kicked in and now the [00:34:00] insurance funding sources are so dominant and requiring certain things that it becomes really challenging to hit therapeutic goals and meet funding source requirements in a clinic setting. You don't really have that problem in school. Meeting certain billable hours and 

This one I think really is more specific definitely to that clinic setting. 

And that's the last one. Oh, good. Hey, what do you think? Fun little exercise. 

Yeah, I feel like we confused a lot of people tonight. No, I'm just laughing because it's just, it really depends, you can speak to the pros and the cons, but what I see as a pro might be a con to you, so it is interesting just teasing apart all the different variables and thinking about what might work best for you personally. 

I think that's the big takeaway I have is that there are pros and cons everywhere, but that's like any job situation. So just do your research, talk to people the opportunity to talk to somebody that's already working there, whether it's a school or the clinic. I think that's huge. And if you can just go and ask to to do an observation, if they'll let you do that, I think that's great. Just feel [00:35:00] the vibe of wherever you're going.

Yes, and also just knowing that you have all the clinic points in the school points, but each individual one, one district to another could be night and day. So do research on those specific agencies or schools and always if you can get into observe, that's huge. 

And I think in particular, if you're doing a clinic, you can't really do this with school, but a clinic, like, what are your billable hours? Do you have a requirement for caseloads, requirement for when a report's due? Those are the type of concrete questions you can ask in a clinic setting that you can't so much in school. I think you can try, but that changes so quickly, but definitely in clinical, you can ask those type of specific questions. You know, how do you feel about work life balance? Do you require work on the evenings and the weekends? Expectations for turnaround for insurance requirements. So there's all sorts of questions you can ask. Don't be afraid to ask those questions straight up. 

It's true. Get a feel for the culture and the vibe.

We will see you next week. We're going to be talking about increasing tolerance in a community [00:36:00] setting. Working with phobias, stuff like that. It'll be fun. So, check us back next week. 

Thanks for listening to the Misfit Behaviorists. And be sure to tune in next week for more tips and tricks.

Don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss an episode.