Getting people to care was never the hard part.
What tends to be missing is a framework that connects the science to the person standing in front of them at eleven o'clock on a Tuesday, when the plan has stopped working and somebody has to decide what happens next. Keynotes, conference sessions, and staff training for schools, agencies, residential programs, universities, and community organizations, across Long Island and nationally.
Why organizers bring me in
Almost every audience I speak to already believes in doing right by neurodivergent students. They walk in wanting to be good at this, and many of them have sat through professional development on the subject before. What they are usually still carrying afterward is a gap between the science they were taught and the child who is standing in front of them when the plan on paper has stopped working and someone has to decide, right then, what happens next.
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That gap is where I spend my time. I have sat on classroom floors with students who had given up on the adults around them, chaired committee meetings, written the reports, and then watched those reports get handed to a paraprofessional who was never told why any of it mattered. Twenty years of moving between those rooms taught me where practice actually breaks down, and taught me how to talk about it in a way that lands for a superintendent and a first-year teaching assistant sitting in the same hour.
I have watched a district spend an entire day on professional development and then watched the same plan fall apart in a classroom the following week, because the person actually running it was never in the room when it was explained. The content is rarely the issue. The issue is who we invite, and what we ask them to carry back out with them.
Sarah Heller, Ed.D., IBA, BCBA, LBA-NY
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So my sessions are built for every role in the building, and they are built to be used the next morning. Attendees leave with the reasoning, the language, and the specific moves, which is what allows the learning to survive contact with a real classroom. When a topic runs deeper than one person should cover alone, I bring in members of our team, including speech-language pathologists with AAC expertise and school psychologists who have sat on CSE subcommittees.
What I speak on
Everything below has been delivered to a real audience, and every session gets rebuilt around your people, your setting, and what your teams are actually wrestling with this year. Sessions scale from a thirty-minute plenary to a full professional development day.
STAFF TRAINING AND SUPERVISION
The plan is only as good as the person carrying it out at nine in the morning, and that person is usually the least trained and least consulted adult in the building. This is the body of work I return to most, across paraprofessionals, teaching assistants, RBTs, and the supervisors responsible for all of them.​
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Supervision You Can Defend: Closing the Gap Between What We Think We Teach and What RBTs Report Getting
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Training for Ethical Situations: Teaching Technicians What to Do When Adults Pressure Unsafe Practice
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The Evolving Role of a Teaching Assistant
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When to Use Your PARA-chute: Emergency Protocols for Paras and TAs
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Assent-Based Supports for School-Based RBTs
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Trauma-Informed Classroom Support, Token Economy Systems, and Managing Transitions for Neurodivergent Learners
Building the people who actually do the work
COMPLEX BEHAVIOR
Most teams can run a plan that is working. What separates a strong team from a struggling one is what happens in the week after it stops. These sessions go into the analytic reasoning behind that moment, and they are built for audiences who want the science rather than a list of strategies.
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When Reinforcement Stops Working: The MO Mystery, covering establishing and abolishing operations and what to do next
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Conditioned Motivating Operations for RBTs
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Escape-Maintained Extinction and Experimental Control
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Task Refusal and the Importance of Functional Language
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Complex Behavior and AAC: Functional Communication Training as an interdisciplinary practice
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Preference Assessments: MSWO and MSW in real classrooms
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Working with precursor behavior before crisis, including progressive-ratio approaches to competing responses
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De-escalation and crisis prevention, informed by instructor-level certification in Nonviolent Crisis Intervention and nine years of running those trainings inside a district
When the plan stops working
SCHOOL-BASED PRACTICE
A school is not a clinic, and a great deal of what fails in school-based ABA fails because it was designed for a setting with different constraints, different authority, and different people running it. Nine years as a district-wide behavior specialist taught me where those seams are.
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The Expert Was Already in the Room: Rethinking Who Leads the FBA
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Stronger Together in the FBA: A BCBA and Educator Collaboration Framework
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Ethical Foundations for Neurodiversity-Affirming ABA in K-12 Schools
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Collaborative Models in School, and Ethics in Schools for BCBAs
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Strategies for Creating an Inclusive Classroom
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Goal Setting and Data Measurement: Progress Mark Tracking
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Integrating behavior support across MTSS tiers, and building a mental health liaison function inside a district
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Social and emotional learning through the CASEL framework
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Behavior and Busses, because transportation is where more plans break than anyone admits
Behavior analysis inside a school building
ETHICS, TECHNOLOGY, AND THE STATE OF THE FIELD
These travel well as conference keynotes and tend to draw mixed audiences, because they are the questions practitioners are arguing about in hallways rather than in journals.
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AI in ABA Practice: Ethical Use, Privacy, and Clinical Decision Limits
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Beyond Social Validity: Ethical Use of Qualitative Methods in ABA Practice
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Assessing Access to Treatment for Children with Autism
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Neuroaffirming Goals for Educators: Ethical and Social Considerations
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Custom topics. Several of my most requested talks began as a conference committee trying to describe something they did not yet have language for.
The conversations the field is having right now
RESIDENTIAL, ADULT, AND TRANSITION SERVICES
Programming for people who live where they are served looks fundamentally different from programming for a school day, and the field talks about it far less than it should. These sessions are for group homes, day programs, agencies serving adults, and the school teams preparing students to enter that world.
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Transitioning from High School to College: Ethical, Neuroaffirming, and Evidence-Based Supports for BCBAs
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When Home Is in Two Places: Behavior-Analytic Strategies for Split and Blended Families
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Staff development and clinical caliber inside residential and OPWDD-funded programs
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Crisis prevention and de-escalation in twenty-four-hour settings, including where standard school-day protocols stop applying
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Building interdisciplinary teams for adults across housing, vocational, and community settings
Support that does not end at three o'clock
Formats
Sessions run in person or virtually, and I am glad to work within whatever your program schedule and budget allow.
30 to 90 minutes
Keynote
Opening or closing address for conferences, district kickoffs, and organizational events.
60 to 120 minutes
Featured session with Q&A
A working session with live question time, sized for breakout rooms and strand programming.
Evening, 60 to 90 minutes
Parent education night
Family-facing sessions for PTAs and SEPTAs, parent organizations, and district family engagement programs.
45 to 90 minutes
Community talk
Public libraries, nonprofits, advocacy organizations, county agencies, and community groups. Written for a mixed room of families, self-advocates, and local professionals who arrive with no shared vocabulary yet.
Multi-session
Series or cohort
Sequenced learning across a semester or year, with implementation coaching between sessions.
Half or full day
Agency all-staff day
Organization-wide sessions for ABA agencies, residential programs, and community providers, sized for mixed clinical and direct-care audiences.
Ongoing
University guest lecture
Graduate and undergraduate course sessions in behavior analysis, special education, and related programs.
Half or full day
PD day kickoff
Whole-staff professional development built for every role in the building, from administration to support staff.
What you receive as an organizer
CEUs issued directly
As an authorized BACB ACE Provider and QABA provider, we issue continuing education credit ourselves for eligible sessions, so you are not chasing a third-party sponsor before your program deadline.
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Learning objectives
Written to align with CEU, PDU, and CTLE submission requirements, delivered early enough for your approval timeline.
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Promotional package
Session description, speaker biography in short and long versions, high-resolution headshot, and an introduction script for your emcee.
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Attendee resource
​A follow-up handout or toolkit your participants keep, so the session has a second life after the day ends.​​
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Online Academy access
Depending on the terms of your contract, attendees may also receive access to resources through the Meaningful Metrics Online Academy, so the learning continues past the session itself.
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Technical requirements sheet
Audiovisual needs, room setup preferences, and accessibility provisions confirmed in writing ahead of time.
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Accessibility planning
Time before the event to hear what your audience is dealing with, so the session speaks to your people rather than a generic room.
Upcoming engagements
2026
NYSCEC Annual Conference
Stronger Together: The Portrait of a Collaborative Special Education Professional. Presenting Stronger Together in the FBA: A BCBA and Educator Collaboration Framework.​
2026
The ABA SPEECH podcast
Complex behavior and AAC and FCT collaboration, delivered as a CEU event.
2027
DADD 28th Annual Educational Conference
Conference on Autism, Intellectual Disability, and Other Developmental Disabilities. Presenting The Expert Was Already in the Room: Rethinking Who Leads the FBA.
Where I have presented
New York State Regional Centers for Autism Spectrum Disorders
Autism Conference: Incorporating strategies that increase positive behaviors across home, school, and community settings.
Association for Behavior Analysis International
Paper and poster session, 36th Annual Conference: Teaching Intraverbal Behavior to Children with Autism.
Long Island School Support Team Conference
Responding to a Changing World, delivered as a CEU session.
Long Island School for the Gifted
Fourth Annual Gifted Symposium parent panel on parenting a neurodivergent child and supporting splinter skills.
Virtual roundtable
Assessing Access to Treatment for Children with Autism During the COVID-19 Pandemic, alongside Dr. Larsson, Mrs. Wright, Dr. Celiberti, and Mr. Cepeda.
District crisis prevention trainings
Nonviolent Crisis Intervention delivered at least three times per school year since 2016, at instructor level rather than as a course participant.
Districts, agencies, and CEU audiences
More than thirty additional sessions across supervision, ethics, complex behavior, inclusive practice, motivation, transitions, and staff development.
A full presentation list, learning objectives, and recorded samples are available on request.
Affiliations: BACB ACE Provider, QABA, International Behavior Analysis Organization CEU Provider, Fordham University, Long Island University, The Groden Network, WBADA
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Teaching, leadership, and service
Adjunct Professor, Fordham University, teaching graduate-level education courses and autism workshops
Graduate Committee Chair, Long Island University
Liaison and Curriculum Writer, DOE Teaching Fellows program
Advisory Board Member, The Groden Network
Board Member, World Behavior Analysis Day Alliance
District-Wide Behavior Specialist, Merrick UFSD, 2016 to 2025
School Building Leader and School District Leader, St. John's University
Ed.D., Educational Administration and Supervision, St. John's University
Founder and Clinical Director, Meaningful Metrics Applied Behavior Analysis, PLLC, Meaningful Metrics, LLC, and Meaningful Metrics Online Academy, LLC
If speaking is not quite what you came for
Some organizations arrive here looking for a keynote and leave having scoped something considerably larger. Both of these run separately from event work, and either one can start with the same conversation.