Meghan Edwards Built the Community for In-School BCBAs That She Needed

From Special Ed Teacher to School-Based BCBA

What do you do when you are the only behavior person in the building, spread across a dozen districts, with the nearest coworker you actually see showing up once every three weeks?

If you are Meghan Edwards, you build the community you were looking for.

Edwards is a school-based Board Certified Behavior Analyst with more than ten years inside K–12 buildings, and the founder of The Behavior Lounge, a membership community for BCBAs who work in schools. But she did not set out to build any of this. She set out as a 22-year-old special education teacher in a rural area, one of the only special ed teachers in her whole school, and, by her own account, mostly winging it.

“Pretty much anyone came to me with questions about anything for students,” she said. There were no severe behaviors, just small ones she could not stop thinking about, like the student who constantly asked questions. “I just wanted to be in his brain and understand his purpose, like why does he keep doing this?”

So one day she Googled “behavior masters for teachers.” She did not even know what a BCBA was when she started the program. “I really kind of stumbled into it, just having an intense interest for understanding why my students did what they did, and how to make sure I was truly helping them in the best way that I could, not just winging it anymore.”

Why the Clinic Playbook Doesn’t Fit a School

That curiosity turned into a credential, and the credential turned into a realization. Most behavior analysts, Edwards points out, are trained in clinics, in a by-the-book, research-based, deeply analytical version of ABA. Schools are a different world. The culture is different, the policies are different, and instead of insurance rules you are navigating the federal and state education regulations that no one taught you.

“You can’t go in with a 40-page behavior plan and expect anybody to look at that and read it,” she said. In a school, she explained, the teachers and paraprofessionals are almost more like her clients than the students are, and a plan only works if a teacher can actually follow it while teaching twenty other kids. “If they can’t do that, it doesn’t matter how good your plan is. It’s not going to get done.”

Built Out of Needing a Community

But the piece that eventually became her business was not clinical at all. It was the loneliness.

Edwards had come from a therapeutic day school, one building where she knew all the paras, all the teachers, and all the students, and where she was part of the community. Then she moved to the public side and found herself covering as many as twelve districts, with an office in a building not even attached to a school. “I don’t have a home in every building,” she said. “I see coworkers once every three weeks at a meeting. So you don’t really have true coworkers or community.”

“Like, I’m not the crazy person. What I’m seeing and what I’m recommending is really what I should be doing.” – Meghan Edwards, founder, The Behavior Lounge.

What she kept hearing from other school-based BCBAs was that they wanted that community too, and not just to hang out. They wanted validation. “Like, I’m not the crazy person. What I’m seeing and what I’m recommending is really what I should be doing.” Working alone, she said, breeds a quiet imposter syndrome, and sometimes all anyone needs is confirmation that they are on the right track.

So, mostly out of loneliness, she started The Behavior Lounge. When it is put to her that she built the community she was searching for, she does not hesitate. “Yeah, because I was by myself,” she said.

Inside The Behavior Lounge

The Behavior Lounge is a professional membership community, a home base built specifically for school-based BCBAs, with monthly CEUs, biweekly live Q&As, a resource library, networking, and ongoing support. Members get more than 70 school-specific resources they can download and use right away, instead of reinventing the wheel in yet another Google Doc. On the surface, Edwards says, it has the conversation and community feel of a Facebook group, but without the negativity and with far more behind it. She has never once had to moderate a question. According to her site, the community has grown past 260 members, priced at $29 a month or $297 a year.

More than a place where members ask questions, it has become a national professional community built specifically for school-based BCBAs. The questions run from the tiny to the very specific. Somebody new to a school asks what to buy with their supply budget. Somebody else asks whether anyone has experience with a student who spits. And every so often Edwards just drops a Starbucks gift card into the group for whoever grabs it first, the digital version of a pizza party. “Just something to brighten people’s day,” she said.

The members are scattered across the United States, along with a few in Canada and one in Iceland. “We’re all working in different schools, but we all have really similar problems,” she said. “We’re all doing things so differently, but our issues are all the same.”

“We’re all doing things so differently, but our issues are all the same.” – Meghan Edwards, founder, The Behavior Lounge.

A Three-Part Model

The Lounge is the heart of a three-part model. A one-time Behavior Toolkit, still in development, will give districts a turnkey bundle of para training, templates, a referral system, and a rollout plan. A higher-touch consulting partnership, built on her trademarked School-Based Behavior System, works directly with district teams on their hardest cases, from more individualized supports to writing the more intensive FBAs.

What ties it all together is Edwards’s insistence on being practical. She wants every training to end with practical tools people can use the very next day- she says, resources that are targeted, community-created, and usable right away, not a framework that means redoing everything. There is very little out there, she notes, built specifically for applying the science inside a school, whether that is CEUs or a curriculum for training paras. “I try to make everything really practical, really straightforward, really easy to digest,” she said.

The appetite is real. This past June, on a Friday at the very start of summer, she ran a session for school BCBAs, and roughly 250 of the 400 who registered showed up live, filling the chat faster than she could read it. “I don’t know if they’re just thirsty for knowledge,” she said, “but they really showed up.”

For a business that began with one lonely behavior analyst Googling her way into a career, that room full of people might be the whole point. Ultimately, Edwards did not just find the community she was looking for. She built it, and it turns out a lot of other people were looking for it too.

AT A GLANCE

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