South Carolina ABA

By Katie Wolfe

South Carolina ABA (SC ABA) had a successful 2021 especially considering the ongoing and unpredictable impact of the pandemic! Board members included president, Kerri Pakurar; president-elect, Katie Wolfe; secretary, Jessica Scibilia/Kim Snyder; treasurer, Anslie Patrick; and student representative, Tameeca Comer.

In 2021, we focused on setting up systems to provide ongoing CEs to our members throughout the year with quarterly journal club events and quarterly ethics events. With the infrastructure for these events now established, we look forward to continuing to provide high-quality, free CEs to SC ABA members. We also edited and revised our by-laws in 2021 to ensure consistency throughout the document and to create a new at-large board member position, which will support the board in planning, organizing, and executing the conference. Dr. Katie Franke, Ph.D., BCBA, was elected to fill this position in October 2021. We continued our licensure efforts, detailed below, and initiated conversations around working towards diversity, equity, and inclusion in the organization that we look forward to continuing in the upcoming year. We managed to exceed fiscal and conference attendance goals in spite of the uncertainty of the year.

Legislative Affairs Committee: The chair of our legislative affairs committee is David Green. Committee members include Kerri Krauss, Zahra Haji, Scott Braud, and Anna Craft. In 2021, a bill for licensure of behavior analysts in the state of South Carolina was proposed in both the House and Senate. A hearing was held in May 2021, with testimony from David Green and Zahra Haji in support of the bill. The South Carolina Speech Language Hearing Association (SCSHA) testified against the bill and requested a number of amendments which could not be resolved. This resulted in the bill being tabled until the next legislative session in 2022. Members of SC ABA, including Anna Craft, Tara Gregori, and Katie Wolfe, met with SCSHA representatives in September 2021 in a good faith effort to compromise on the language included in the bill. Our lobbyist provided an update to members at our conference in October 2021, and the licensure committee worked on revising the language in the bill to prepare for the 2022 legislative session.

Social Committee
We had transitions in our social chair position in 2021 as Kimberly Snyder, who served as the social chair, was appointed secretary of SC ABA. We appointed a new social chair in May 2021, but unfortunately, she had to relocate out of state in October. We are currently working on appointing a new social chair and have several high-quality candidates. Despite the transitions and the ongoing pandemic concerns, we were able to host two social events in 2021.

Ethics Committee
In March 2021, Suzanne Moore was appointed to lead our Ethics Committee. We opened an ethics portal where members could submit ethical dilemmas for discussion at our virtual ethics CE events. Suzanne organized and held an ethics event via Zoom in August 2021 that was very well attended. We will continue to support membership in this way by offering ethics CEs quarterly. We had a few changes in leadership in 2021:

Jessica Scibilia (secretary) transitioned off the board and Kim Snyder was appointed as our new secretary.
Kim Snyder (social chair) transitioned to secretary and Tiffany Swiatek was appointed social chair.
Katie Franke was elected to a new board position of member at-large.
In addition to these efforts, SC ABA hosted the following presenters at our annual conference October 25–26, 2021, in Greenville SC. We were pleased to be able to offer a hybrid conference to our members to allow those to attend who were unable to travel to Greenville.
Dr. Greg Hanley presented a workshop titled, “Towards a Practical Functional Assessment and Treatment Process Addressing Severe Problem Behavior”
Dr. Greg Hanley presented a keynote titled, “Towards Trauma-Assumed Applied Behavior Analysis: Key Values and Global Measures”
Ashley Rose presented, “Soft Skills are the Hard Skills”
Dr. Becca Tagg presented “The End Is Just the Beginning: Supervision Past the 2,000 hours”
Dr. Patrick McGreevy presented, “Behavioral Intervention or School Instruction for Children and Adults With Limited Skill Repertoires”

Attendees appreciated the hybrid option for our conference, and we received great feedback on the presentations from our members!

Our 2022 conference was held in Charleston, SC on October 24–25, 2022.

For more information about our conferences, membership, or upcoming events, please visit our website, www.sc-aba.org, or like us on Facebook (South Carolina Association for Behavior Analysis). As a perk of SC ABA membership, updates are regularly provided to members on relevant legislature, area events related to behavior analysis, and changes affecting providers.