NIU’s M.S.Ed. in Special Education: Behavior Analysis is under new management.
Brandon Perez, assistant professor in the Department of Special and Early Education, is now coordinating the program led for years by Professor Jesse “Woody” Johnson, the college’s senior faculty fellow for 2021-23.
Perez is committed to retaining Johnson’s commitment on preparing graduate students to sit for the Board Certified Behavior Analyst® (BCBA) examination followed by work in school settings while also infusing his own background and specialty in clinical work to the degree.
“The thing I noticed when I moved to Illinois is that there are not a lot of behavior analysis programs, which is surprising to me because Illinois is a progressive state,” says Perez, who grew up in Florida. “There are a lot of resources, and there are training programs, but two of them have closed in the last five years – so there are now even fewer than when I moved here.”
He is devoted to building the profession, and is proud to follow in Johnson’s footsteps.
“Woody has done a really great job with the program. Students love Woody, and he’s honestly essential for this program. He has a lot of really, really good experiences. He’s absolutely a mentor to me,” Perez says.
“It’s cool hearing him talk about this program, too: His focus was always training educators to become BCBAs because they were very often, and honestly, neglected from BCBA programs because most of the training around the country, and at the time the program here was started, was clinical. Their class times are typically during the day,” he adds.
“For an educator who’s working full time in schools, it’s impossible to take those courses, and so that was always Woody’s goal: working people, and people who have families, who can’t take classes during the day. ‘Let’s get them trained to become BCBAs.’ That’s something I will love to uphold.”
Johnson, who plans to serve as an adjunct BCBA instructor after he eventually retires, approves.
“As the new coordinator of SEED’s BCBA program, Brandon hit the ground running and took leadership in guiding program faculty to make revisions for upcoming changes in accreditation requirements. He has built on existing partnerships with community agencies and worked to establish new partnerships,” Johnson says. “Brandon is a very effective and collaborative leader who is student-focused, and I am sure the BCBA program will continue to thrive under his leadership.”
Most of NIU’s current BCBA students are teachers “wanting additional training in behavior, or in how to write better behavior support plans,” Perez says, and the 30 students newly enrolled in a contract cohort with Westside Children’s Therapy and Turning Pointe Autism Foundation are contributing to a growth of the program’s clinical side.
Choosing NIU furnishes all of those students with a “breadth of knowledge about behavior analysis” from caring faculty who have received awards for their teaching, he adds.
“Our faculty have a lot of unique experiences,” Perez says. “We’ve got faculty who’ve worked in schools for 10 to 15 years and we have BCBAs who have worked in schools. We also have someone like me who doesn’t have a background in schools but has clinical experience. And then we’ve got Woody, who’s been in the field for a really long time.”
Delivering coursework fully online, meanwhile, allows NIU to reach students throughout Illinois and beyond.
“The nice thing about NIU’s program is that it’s online and synchronous, so you still get that connection with your cohort and with other students,” he says. “It’s not completely self-paced like some of those other programs.”
FOR PEREZ, THE ROAD to DeKalb launched in Gainesville, where he earned his bachelor’s, master’s and Ph.D. degrees in psychology.
“I knew in high school that I really enjoyed working with kids and that I really enjoyed psychology, and then I got some experience in high school and college work with kids with autism and special needs,” Perez says.
“Not many people know about the field of behavior analysis – it wasn’t until college that I did – and, luckily, the University of Florida has a big and very well-known program,” he adds. “I just kind of happened upon it.”
Years later, under the doctoral mentorship of Professor Tim Vollmer, Perez pursued his emphasis in behavior analysis. Introduced to that aspect of psychology while taking a couple of Vollmer’s earlier courses, “I fell in love with the work I was doing, primarily with kids with autism.”
“I decided I wanted to get my Ph.D. eventually, but I knew that I needed some more practical experience – more clinical experience – and so I took some time off,” Perez says. “I worked at the Florida Autism Center.”
Relatively small at the time, with four locations across the Sunshine State, the Florida Autism Center now “has blown up. They’ve partnered with a lot of much-larger organizations and are all around the country now.”
But during his years there, Perez functioned as what is now called a registered behavior technician, “helping to essentially run all of our new-hire training any time a new behavior therapist would start. I would write treatment plans for the kids I was working with, and I would continue to do direct care with them. I was doing parent training for families.”
He also “did a lot of phone calls with insurance companies.”
“That was not the best part of my job, but it was something that was really important,” he says.
“As many people know, insurance companies are not great about following through with things and, luckily, the companies would provide funding for applied behavior analysis therapy for most of the kids we worked with,” he adds, “but they would constantly reject the authorizations we would make or the plans we would write, so I was always on the phone negotiating with insurance companies, trying to prove that the child I was working with needed the number of hours we were requesting.”
Perez also discovered a love of research, partially through assisting “some really phenomenal grad students.”
His own interests are primarily centered around working with individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities, including autism spectrum disorder and include toilet training and the assessment and treatment of severe problem behavior. He has published articles in, and serves as a reviewer for, multiple behavior-analytic journals.
Moving into the educational space at NIU taps into his Florida Autism Center days.
“A lot of what I do now, teaching master’s and undergraduate students in the classroom, is very similar to the strategies that I used when I was working with new staff and training new staff,” he says. “That kind of solidified the fact that I love teaching and that I love talking about behavior analysis.”
Why?
“I think that what I love so much about behavior analysis is that it brings the areas of psychology that I love, and that it brings science and education, into one cool hub,” Perez says. “For a lot of the individuals who you work with, who have really significant problem behaviors and who have really significant challenges, behavior analysis is one of the few ways where I can see learning happen and where I can see progress happen on a daily basis.”
