These answers draw in part from “Can't we all just get along?” by Nicki Postma, BCBA (BehaviorLive), and extend it with peer-reviewed research from our library of 27,900+ ABA research articles. Clinical framing, BACB ethics code references, and cross-links below are synthesized by Behaviorist Book Club.
View the original presentation →The most commonly identified pitfalls include: presenting at IEP meetings in ways that position the home BCBA as the authority on the student's behavioral needs, without genuine curiosity about the school team's observations and experience; communicating primarily through parents rather than directly with school staff, creating triangulation and information distortion; requesting school data without appropriate release documentation in place, creating legal risk for the school; providing recommendations for school implementation without understanding the school's capacity, staffing, and schedule constraints; and failing to reciprocate information sharing by providing the school team with data and program summaries from the home program.
FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) governs how schools manage and share educational records. Schools cannot share a student's educational records — including IEP documents, assessment results, and behavioral data collected in school — with outside providers without written parental consent. Home BCBAs who request school records without ensuring appropriate consent documentation is in place are creating legal liability for the school. The practical implication is that every home-school coordination relationship requires proactive consent documentation before substantive information sharing can occur. Home BCBAs should make obtaining appropriate release forms part of their initial case intake process for any student receiving school-based services.
Special education directors operate under significant resource constraints — time, staffing, budget — that shape every interaction with outside providers. From their perspective, home ABA providers who are collaborative partners are those who understand and respect the school's constraints, who bring information rather than demands, and who frame their involvement as supporting the IEP process rather than circumventing or critiquing it. Directors who have had difficult experiences with home ABA providers — who have experienced adversarial IEP meetings, received demands that could not be accommodated within school resources, or had their staff's professional judgment dismissed — carry that history into subsequent interactions. Building a positive reputation as a collaborative partner takes time and consistent behavior, not a single meeting.
Welcomed IEP participation requires a posture that signals genuine collaboration rather than advocacy for the home program. Practical approaches include: requesting to attend with an explicit framing of what you bring (home observation data, current home program summary) and what you hope to learn (what the school team is observing, what goals they are prioritizing); providing a brief written summary of the home program ahead of the meeting so team members can review it; asking questions before making recommendations; and explicitly affirming the school team's expertise about the student's school-based behavior. The goal is to leave the meeting with better cross-setting alignment and a defined communication protocol going forward — not to secure agreement with the home program.
Parents are the primary connective tissue between home and school services, and their experience of managing two separate service systems significantly shapes the home-school relationship. Parents who are actively engaged and confident advocates can facilitate direct communication between providers, request joint meetings, and push for coherent goal alignment. Parents who are overwhelmed, disempowered, or caught between competing professional perspectives may inadvertently hinder coordination by selectively sharing information or by becoming the intermediary through which all communication flows — a role that distorts information and creates triangulation. Supporting parents in understanding the value of cross-setting coordination — and in having the specific conversations with school staff that coordination requires — is part of the home BCBA's role.
Concrete action items from Postma's framework include: obtain written consent for information sharing before making any requests of the school team; proactively share home program summaries with the school team at the beginning of treatment and at regular intervals; identify a specific point of contact at the school for each case and establish a regular communication protocol; request to attend IEP meetings and come prepared with data rather than recommendations; ask the school team what they are observing and what they need from you before telling them what you need from them; and position yourself in communications as a partner supporting the IEP rather than an outside expert with a separate and superior program.
Goal disagreements between home and school programs are best addressed through direct conversation with the school team, informed by parental input, and grounded in data from both settings. The starting point is understanding the rationale for the school's goal priorities — what is driving their focus, what are they observing, and what outcomes are they accountable for? That understanding may reveal that the apparent disagreement is a difference in framing rather than a genuine value conflict. When genuine goal conflicts exist, the resolution process should be collaborative — involving the parent as the primary stakeholder — rather than adversarial. A home BCBA who frames a goal disagreement as the school being wrong and the home program being right is positioning the conflict in a way that is unlikely to produce alignment.
The public policy perspective illuminates the regulatory and systemic factors that shape the home-school relationship at the macro level — state insurance mandates, IDEA implementation variations across districts, funding mechanisms that create incentives for siloed service delivery, and advocacy opportunities that practitioners can engage to support better coordination at the system level. For individual practitioners, the most actionable policy insight is understanding what insurance mandates in their state require of ABA providers and what IDEA requires of school districts — because the gap between those two regulatory frameworks is where most home-school coordination failures originate. Understanding the policy landscape also supports more effective advocacy for clients when coordination is blocked by systemic barriers rather than individual relationship failures.
Active resistance from school teams is typically not arbitrary — it usually has a history, either with this specific family and provider or with ABA providers generally in that district. The first response is genuine inquiry: what is the source of the resistance, and is there something in the prior relationship that needs to be addressed before productive collaboration is possible? If the resistance reflects a prior adversarial interaction, acknowledging it directly — without defensiveness — often creates more movement than continuing to press for collaboration. If the resistance reflects a systemic school policy about outside providers, the parent may need to advocate at the administrative level for appropriate information sharing. When resistance is genuinely intractable despite good-faith effort, documenting those efforts and communicating them to parents and appropriate stakeholders is both practically and ethically important.
Code 2.03 requires BCBAs to take responsibility for the quality and appropriateness of services they provide. For home BCBAs serving school-age students, this provision has cross-setting implications: a behavior intervention plan that contradicts, undermines, or operates in complete isolation from the school program is not providing the most effective service the BCBA is capable of providing. The responsibility standard requires actively seeking the coordination that would make services more effective — not as a courtesy but as a professional obligation. This means pursuing information about the school program, seeking coordination when it would improve client outcomes, and acknowledging when the absence of coordination is limiting the effectiveness of home services.
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Can't we all just get along? — Nicki Postma · 1 BACB Supervision CEUs · $20
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All behavior-analytic intervention is individualized. The information on this page is for educational purposes and does not constitute clinical advice. Treatment decisions should be informed by the best available published research, individualized assessment, and obtained with the informed consent of the client or their legal guardian. Behavior analysts are responsible for practicing within the boundaries of their competence and adhering to the BACB Ethics Code for Behavior Analysts.