Episode description

In Session 243, Dr. Casey Dupart joins me to talk about School Psychology, and in doing so, we touched on a range of related topics including the challenges of military families, multi-tiered systems of supports, socio-emotional learning, school refusal, educational policy, and so much more. 

As you'll hear in the interview, Casey has been a School Psychologist in various roles across several states. She also provides consultation and training through her company, Embracing Resilience. And while we're on that topic, she has a few webinars and workshops coming up on topics like Multidisciplinary Collaboration and Improving School Climate and Culture. You can find links to these events at the shownotes for this episode, or simply go to Embracingresiliance.org and click the services tab here. 

I believe BCBAs serving in public school settings may be an increasing area of practice. According to the BACB, about 12% of the BCBA and BCBA-D certificants work in educational settings. Also, I was invited to speak about low-tech interventions for disruptive classroom behavior at the recent BABAT conference, and I was honestly shocked to how many attendees were interested in this topic, particularly given the many other excellent talks that were going on in the same time slot.

As some of you may already know, I’ve been working with Anika Costa and Dr. Paulie Gavoni on a project called thebehavioraltoolbox.com to provide BCBAs and other school-based professionals trainings and tools to help them perform more successfully in these settings. Our first course, Ready, Set, Consult! is now available, and we’ve been really pleased with the feedback that we’ve gotten from our initial participants.

We’re also hard at work on getting our second course ready. This one is based off of the talk I gave at the recent BABAT conference. Our working title currently is, When NOT to FBA: 5 Quick Strategies for Improving Behavior in Classroom. I mention all of this to perhaps underscore the importance of being able to work both collaboratively and effectively in school settings.

And I think this conversation with Casey will be helpful for BCBAs who are new to school settings, or who simply want to be more successful with the students they serve. 

Here are some links to resources, etc... we discussed during the podcast:

• Back to School with PBIS, Session 198.
• PBIS, School Mental Health, and Supporting Students with Trauma: Session 78.
• Other school-related BOP shows.
• CASEL: Fundamentals of Social Emotional Learning.
• Sold a Story Podcast.
• Chronic absenteeism article.
• More school refusal literature.
• ABA Inside Track episode on chronic absenteeism.