Resource library

A Forta BCBA's rule is to choose prompts that lead to you doing less, and a picture fades more easily than a parent repeating every step. The piece walks one routine, getting dressed or brushing teeth, from a vocal prompt to a visual one, then through removing the visual, and names the point at which muscle memory has taken over.

A goal that can't be counted can't be reported on, and the requirement that it be measurable is written into federal regulation rather than left to a district's judgment. The five things 34 CFR 300.320 requires on the goals page, which one changes meetings, a vague goal rewritten next to the version that can be scored, the four responses families hear and what the rule says back, and the sentences to use in the room.

Your child is talking in session, and then the house goes back to how it was. You're not imagining it. What you're seeing has a name, a research literature going back to 1977, and nine specific techniques for helping skills travel home.

When an IEP team turns down a request, federal law says the refusal has to be put in writing, along with the records behind it. What prior written notice is, the one sentence that asks for it, and six things to do in the meeting and after it.

You do the thing because doing the thing takes ninety seconds and teaching the thing takes six weeks. Every parent does this. Here are ten ordinary tasks a teenager could be handed, the smallest version of each, and what a follow-up study of 779 students actually found.

Refusal in adolescence is common enough that the professional standards your child’s BCBA is certified under already have language for it, and that language puts the responsibility on the behavior analyst rather than on you. Here are the four standards that apply, what each one actually says, and what to ask at your next meeting.

Four institutions have obligations that come due around your child's eighteenth birthday, and none of them coordinate with the others. Three IEP requirements, one Social Security redetermination, the deadline on each, and the regulation it comes from. Two of the four are already past due for most families, which means you can check them today.

Your child’s autism diagnosis does not expire, but the documentation supporting it does. In Texas Medicaid, an evaluation older than three years requires a full comprehensive re-evaluation before ABA is recertified, and nobody sends a notice when that date passes. Here is what the manual requires, component by component, and the dates to get onto one calendar.

An autism diagnostic evaluation produces a document with required components, and a standardized tool is one of them. A comparison score is not a DSM severity level, and an ADOS classification is not a DSM diagnosis. What the instrument establishes, what the other six components ask for, who can complete the evaluation, and a nine-item checklist for the report before it reaches a payer.

A denied Extended School Year request and a loss of skills over the summer are one connected sequence under 19 TAC §89.1065, not two separate events. Here are the six provisions, who owns each one, what the rule counts as a critical skill, and why several of these obligations are keyed to the first eight weeks of the school year.