Brooklyn Salaries for BTs and BCBAs

Fox

Wed, May 04 2016, 12:38 pm

So DD (Clementine, to be exact) has been working as a Behavior Therapist doing ABA. She's been very successful at it and is considering upgrading her qualifications through additional education, etc.

However, it is likely that she'll be relocating to Brooklyn for the long term, and we have a few questions. We thought some of you wonderful Imamothers might be able to give us insights based on your experiences as professionals and/or parents.

* What are typical hourly rates for BTs? Salaries for BCBAs?

* Would proficiency in Yiddish help her command a higher salary?

* Are there other skills or competencies in addition to ABA that boost salaries and/or employment options?

* Are there any skills or competencies that are especially in demand?

Thanks in advance! Remember, a move to Brooklyn for Clementine means a sewing room for me! Smile

Fox

Wed, May 04 2016, 1:22 pm

mha3484 wrote:

I think it would be helpful to say what her current qualifications are. Does she have a bachelors or masters degree? A BCBA has a masters degree and passed an exam if I am not mistaken so that will command a certain salary.

She's not looking for a position at this time; she's simply investigating the field for its long-term career prospects. Since each state and region compensates these types of jobs differently, she's interested in how employment prospects in Brooklyn compare to the Midwest.

imorethanamother

Wed, May 04 2016, 2:04 pm

In NY, you can be an aide and perform SEIT with no college backround, although you have to go to people's houses and college is preferred. The most you would get is 15-25 hours a week. People do this while getting a BCBA or other special Ed credentials. It won't be a lot of money, but it's not minimum wage either. With any college degree, it will be about $20/hour on a per diem basis, but no guarantee on annual totals. People tend to use it as a stepping stone because of the lower pay and the burnout rates.

NY will not hire you for school settings - a much cushier job - without various degrees. A MA/MS in special Ed is paramount and a BCBA necessary for supervisory work.

As for the Midwest, it's about the same. However, NY has a greater need for ABA therapists in schools because their state will fund these far more readily than the Midwest.

seeker

Wed, May 04 2016, 6:03 pm

Fox wrote:

I don't know of Behavior Therapist as a title that gets any special position, except perhaps in private practice (unless she is something else including BT - is that a type of social worker or special ed teacher? I'm not so familiar with it as a title)

BCBA is the gold standard in ABA provision and a very significant salary jump from an ABA therapist without a BCBA. It's an intense path, but you can use paid experience for all the internship requirements which is a huge plus.

Proficiency in Yiddish may not result in a higher salary compared to non-Yiddish-speaking therapists but it is more in demand so the likelihood of ultimately making more due to more jobs/cases available is pretty good.

Any competency could increase employment options (floortime, social thinking, etc) but not necessarily salaries. Salaried positions tend to be fairly standard, and private practice you can charge pretty much whatever you want depending how much demand you can appeal.

Enjoy your sewing room. There is a lot of business for qualified ABA providers in Brooklyn right now.

seeker

Wed, May 04 2016, 6:06 pm

imorethanamother wrote:

No clue where you get your ideas but you cannot be a SEIT without college background - specifically, state teacher certification. You can be an ABA assistant with no background but you will hit a very low ceiling with that. I believe the requirements for becoming a BCBA also include some level of college education and prior certification but I don't remember exactly.

If you ARE a certified teacher, you can totally do SEIT at $50+ per hour as part of your work toward a BCBA, but it is hard to get SEIT cases - slightly easier if you have ABA qualifications but still the SEIT field is cluttered. Salaried positions in schools are a little easier to come by.

amother

Bronze

Wed, May 04 2016, 10:20 pm

imorethanamother wrote:

Did you mean a para?

cnc

Wed, May 04 2016, 11:11 pm

imorethanamother wrote:

You need a college degree as well as NYS certification in order to be a SEIT.

seeker

Thu, May 05 2016, 12:13 am

runninglate wrote:

Can Seit work really count for all those BCBA hours? I was considering the field, but I got scared off when I saw all those internship hours.

It depends. I am pretty sure either all or most of the hours need to be "supervised" to some extent with a smaller portion directly supervised, so you'd need to be working either for an agency or in a school that has a BCBA on board who is willing to provide the supervision. And I'm assuming that your cases need to be relevant to ABA, though I could be mistaken, maybe they're OK with just applying some ABA principles to any case, which is easy enough to fit because you definitely don't need autism to benefit from structured behavioral intervention.

greenfire

Thu, May 05 2016, 12:27 am

Have you thought of a Speech Language Pathologist. You need the higher education; however the salaries are very good. If Clementine is good working with challenged people/kids the jobs vary from being hired in one particular school to working in varied settings helping rid of stuttering or learning to swallow or communicate, etc.

http://www.asha.org/Students/S.....logy/

[my niece is an SLP and works in a school environment and doesn't have to run from school to school for each client]

seeker

Thu, May 05 2016, 12:28 am

jeweled wrote:

What does 45 an hour translate to a year? Is it an 8 hr day or usually less?

It is extremely difficult to translate hourly into yearly pay, or to predict how many hours will be in a day. Which is the reason that despite hourly work paying more per hour, many to most people end up opting for salaried positions. The increase in stability is worth a lot. Also, taxes are significantly higher when you're self employed, which includes most of these per-hour jobs.

The per-hour jobs consist of putting together a caseload where each case has a certain number of hours per week that may need to be distributed in certain ways. Especially at the beginning of the school year, for school-year-based cases (which is most) there is a large pool of providers competing for each case. Unless you have some kind of relationship set up like you take all the cases within a certain school, you have no way of predicting whether you'll have any cases at a given time (though it's fairly certain that if you have the luxury of waiting around for an undefined number of months, something will come your way eventually) Later in the year new kids get referred for services and your caseload may grow. So if you get 8 hours a week in September but end off the year with 30 hours per week, that could potentially average out to a decent yearly earning.

Then remember that per-hour means you are only paid for working hours. Two week Pesach vacation = subtract two weeks' pay. Your 10-hour-a-week case is home for two days with strep - there goes another $180. The kid tells mommy she doesn't like therapy and mommy opts for a program change - back to the drawing board. I had a case where the family just picked up and MOVED, without telling anyone, it was a home based case and I didn't find out until I was knocking on their door for 15 minutes and finally got through to mom's cell phone to hear about this.

It's very fickle. Good for people who like to live in touch with their bitachon so that when things fall through you can remind yourself that parnassah is from Hashem and the next case will come when the time is right (though meanwhile you are going to call every agency in the city, STAT.)

If you have a family and DH doesn't have a job with benefits, you're better off in a "normal" job with lower pay and more benefits/stability.

seeker

Thu, May 05 2016, 12:30 am

greenfire wrote:

If she is early enough in her career to make this choice, it is an excellent suggestion. There is a market for ABA speech therapists, by the way. In my work as a special ed provider I've discovered that the speech therapists in our teams do many of the same things but are more in demand and paid better, as far as I can tell.

Unfortunately when I was choosing my college major I did not fully understand the many roles speech therapists fill. I was thinking helping kids pronounce R or stop lisping, but they are also your experts on social skills (as pertains to communication) and language learning (I would guesstimate about 80-90% of the kids I work with in special ed have some degree of language learning difficulty) There is a major overlap between what I and their speech therapists do to help them.