Behavior School

School BCBA Systems Letter

Research that leads to a practical next step

School is starting. What if a student won’t go?

When a student's attendance becomes a concern, the most visible number is usually the percentage of school missed. That number matters. But it does not tell the team why the student cannot enter, attend, or remain at school.

Before the team writes a percentage goal, adds a contingency, or requests an FBA, it should identify where attendance breaks down, what conditions may be standing in the student's way, and which professionals need to help answer the remaining questions.

This is not an argument for removing attendance expectations or assuming every absence is driven by anxiety. Health, transportation, housing, family circumstances, safety, instruction, mental health, and environmental contingencies can produce similar attendance records. It is also not an argument that the BCBA should own every case. The point is to understand the problem before assigning the procedure.

School refusal can involve more than the student

Chen and colleagues studied 106 adolescents ages 12 to 18 and their parents. Adolescents displaying school-refusal behaviors reported greater anxiety and depression than adolescents who were not displaying those behaviors. Their analyses also found that adolescent age and parental emotion dysregulation were independently associated with school-refusal behavior.

That does not mean parents caused the attendance problem. It does mean a team should be careful about treating absence as a simple student-compliance issue. The student's emotional experience and the family's capacity to support a difficult return may both require attention, often in collaboration with school mental-health and family-support professionals.

The study was cross-sectional, so it cannot establish what caused the school-refusal behavior or which intervention would work. It also did not test an intervention delivered by school BCBAs.

This prompt does not determine function by itself. Use it to organize interviews, attendance-pattern review, student and family input, observations when possible, and collaboration with the professionals responsible for the barriers being considered.

Chen, J., Feleppa, C., Sun, T., Sasagawa, S., Smithson, M., & Leach, L. (2024). School refusal behaviors: The roles of adolescent and parental factors. Behavior Modification, 48(5-6), 561-580. https://doi.org/10.1177/01454455241276414

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A function-based plan can still miss safety, voice, and relationships

Pollack and colleagues reviewed 56 articles evaluating function-based interventions for elementary students with emotional or behavioral disorders. They identified practices aligned with six trauma-informed pillars: safety; student voice and choice; skill teaching; interprofessional collaboration; healthy relationships; and family, culture, or community involvement.

The review found that many potentially trauma-informed practices were absent from most interventions. The authors highlighted skill teaching, healthy relationships, and family, culture, and community involvement as areas needing more attention.

For an attendance concern, the practical implication is not that every student needs a trauma intervention. It is that a technically function-based plan may still be incomplete if the team has not considered whether school feels predictable and safe, whether the student has a meaningful voice in the plan, which skills are missing, and which relationships or family supports matter.

This review focused on externalizing behavior among elementary students with emotional or behavioral disorders. It did not evaluate school-refusal interventions specifically, so applying its framework to attendance is a professional interpretation rather than a direct research finding.

Pollack, M. S., Lloyd, B. P., Doyle, L. E., Santini, M. A., & Crowell, G. E. (2024). Are function-based interventions for students with emotional/behavioral disorders trauma informed? A systematic review. Behavior Analysis in Practice, 17(3), 709-726. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40617-023-00893-y

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Using this map for one student can prevent a premature plan. The harder work is creating a school pathway that uses the same questions consistently, identifies who leads each part of the response, and sets a date for the team to review what it learns.

That is where an attendance concern becomes a systems-leadership question. The goal is not to make the BCBA responsible for every barrier. It is to build a repeatable process that helps the school choose the right team, the right assessment, and the right next decision.

Build the system behind the attendance decision

That is why I built the School BCBA Transformation Program. School-based BCBAs apply the work directly to a student, staff member, or system they currently support, including team decision processes, functional assessment, and caseload systems.

See the School BCBA Transformation Program

Until next week,

Rob Spain, BCBA, IBA
Founder, Behavior School