Yikes - Anonymous employee JumpStart Autism Collective Employee Review

Thank you for taking the time to leave a review. It is with all due respect that we whole heartily disagree with your atypical feedback. We have an Ethical Officer who addresses any potential ethical issues that arise throughout our organization. We have confirmed with that individual that no ethical concerns have been raised in the past 18 months. JumpStart has received a 3-year accreditation from the Behavioral Health Center of Excellence (BHCOE), which is established after a comprehensive audit of our clinical services, training requirements, and policies and procedures. In the audit, completed by a nationally recognized expert in ABA, the BHCOE had ZERO ethical concerns about our clinical services and business practices. Less than 5% of all companies going through the BHCOE audit receive a 100% passing rate and 3-year accreditation. If you honestly have concerns about our clinical services, you can reach out to the BHCOE Compliance team to report your concerns, so we can objectively address those concerns (https://www.bhcoe.org/become-a-bhcoe/report-a-compliance-concern/). We were also very surprised to see your statement that JumpStart is not supportive of our employees. One major way we support our staff is to offer excellent health care insurance and benefits, which you acknowledged. We also have employee engagement committees (made up of employees from all levels) that develop employee health and wellness initiatives at each center. Our staff’s physical health and mental health are critical to their success and our clients’ success. We also support our staff by welcoming all feedback to help improve our clinical services and administrative processes. For example, we conduct regular stay interviews with all our employees every three months where we encourage all employees to tell us what they need to better do their job, what is difficult about their job, to raise any concerns, and to make suggestions that would make JumpStart better. Dr. Lopez, our CEO, reviews summaries of these stay interviews to ensure we are doing everything possible to support our team. Your comments are concerning as this feedback does not match current nor past employee feedback from our stay interviews or from the exit interviews we conduct with all staff who are leaving JumpStart. Given our commitment to receive and implement staff feedback, we wish you would’ve provided specific actionable feedback so it could be used to improve our services or so we can explain why specific policies are in place based on labor laws or the clinical needs of clients. Finally, our extensive clinical training procedures, that far surpass industry standards, are another way we go above and beyond to support our team. - Clinical Training as a New Hire: All our RBTs receive 4-6 weeks of full-time training (an average of 165 hours of training) before they work with a learner by themselves. During phase one of training, new hires receive direct training from a full training team to support them to acquire the behavioral and knowledge competencies required to effectively implement high-quality ABA services. Then our RBTs must pass quality assurance and assessments that demonstrate they can implement the skills before we sign off on their qualifications to take the RBT exam. After receiving their RBT certification, our staff continues to receive training to complete phase two and ongoing company-wide training on specific topics. - Clinical Training to Allow RBTs to Make Clinical Decisions: JumpStart is one of the only ABA providers that trains our RBTs to make databased decisions, which enables our RBTs to analyze data, modify interventions they are utilizing, and call a Clinical Supervisor’s (BCBA) attention to a specific problem an RBT is experiencing. The extensive clinical training provided to our RBTs ensures our RBTs are highly engaged in our learners’ progress, clinical outcomes, and are active members of the clinical team. Our clinical training is unique in the ABA industry because we engage RBTs in the clinical process and train them to make clinical decisions that impact their learners’ outcomes. - Clinical Training to Grow a Personal Career Path: JumpStart offers multiple career paths, and we have extensive training procedures for each position. We offer both clinical and staff training career paths and each position within those paths has highly specified training requirements. Our extensive training ensures each level of clinical support is highly effective and broadens the avenues for RBTs to receive clinical support when working with our learners. Given we have multiple levels of clinical and training support staff, it might look like an inverted pyramid of support, meaning the entire company is focused on supporting each RBT while they work with a learner (the tip of the pyramid) by broader and broader levels of supports. We are sorry your experience at JumpStart was not to your satisfaction. We disagree with your assessment of our ethical behavior and encourage you to provide any additional specific details or feedback to hr@jumpstartaba.com.