What happens to your child's in-home ABA when school starts?
Most Colorado families keep both.
What changes is the hours. Kids who were doing 25 or 30 hours a week usually drop to somewhere between 5 and 15 once they are in a classroom, and the therapy moves to after school or to the days they are not in class. The therapy itself rarely ends.
The harder question is whether your ABA therapist can follow your child into the building. In Denver, the honest answer is usually no, and there are numbers to show it.
The hours are what change, not the therapy
School eats the middle of the day, which is exactly when ABA used to happen. So the week gets rebuilt. Your BCBA sets the new hour count from clinical need, and your insurance still has to authorize it, which means the number is not something you and the school negotiate on a whim.
Below is how Colorado families we work with actually put the week back together. None of these is the correct one. They fit different kids.
| Setup | What the week looks like | Who it tends to fit |
|---|---|---|
| Full school day, ABA after | School until mid-afternoon, then 2 to 3 hours of in-home ABA a few days a week. | Kids who can hold it together through a full day. Watch for burnout, because this makes for a long day for a six year old. |
| Half day school, half day ABA | Mornings at school, afternoons at home with an RBT. | Preschool and kindergarten, and kids who fall apart in the afternoon anyway. |
| School most days, ABA on full days off | Three or four school days, one or two full ABA days. | Kids who need bigger blocks of teaching and do badly with short choppy sessions. |
| Delay a year, keep the hours | Stay in full-time ABA, start kindergarten the following year. | Kids with no reliable way to ask for help yet. This is a real option and it is not a failure. |
Parents talk about this decision constantly, and they are blunt about it. One parent on r/Autism_Parenting laid out a full-day kindergarten plus 20 hours of ABA and then said the quiet part out loud:
"He's in class from 9-3:15, he would then hop on a bus and get to ABA around 3:45 til 7. 9-7 feels like a crazy long day for a 6yo."
Parent, r/Autism_Parenting
Another parent in the same thread described what the families around her had settled on:
"A lot of families near me do either half day at school and half day ABA or two days of ABA full day and school 3 days a week."
Parent, r/Autism_Parenting
That is the real menu. The mistake is not picking wrong. The mistake is letting the school build one plan while your BCBA builds a different one, and nobody notices until your kid is the one absorbing the difference.
Can your ABA therapist go into the school? In Denver, usually not.
This is where parents get blindsided, so here are the actual numbers instead of a reassuring paragraph.
In the year leading up to October 2024, Denver Public Schools received 28 requests to let an outside ABA provider work with a student inside the school. It approved three. That is roughly 11 percent. Other Front Range districts behaved completely differently.
| Colorado district | Outside in-school ABA requests | Approved |
|---|---|---|
| Denver Public Schools | 28 in the prior year | 3, about 11% |
| Jefferson County (Jeffco) | All requests received | All approved |
| Douglas County | All requests received | All approved |
| Cherry Creek | All requests received | All approved |
| Aurora Public Schools | Over three years | About half |
Source: Chalkbeat Colorado, October 2, 2024.
Most vendor websites imply Colorado law is on your side here. It mostly is not, and you should know that before you build a plan around it.
A 2020 bill, HB 20-1058, would have required districts to let behavior analysts deliver medically necessary services when a family asked. It died in committee. The law that actually passed, HB 22-1260, only requires each district to write and publish a policy explaining how a child with a prescription for medically necessary treatment gets it at school. A policy is not a yes.
So your district matters more than your paperwork. If you are choosing where to live or where to enroll, that Chalkbeat table is worth more than any provider's promise, ours included.
The Colorado clock nobody hands you
Three deadlines decide how this goes, and schools are not required to chase you about any of them.
The evaluation clock. Once you give written consent, the district has 60 calendar days to evaluate your child and decide eligibility. If your child qualifies, the first IEP has to exist within 90 calendar days of that same consent date. Put your request in writing and keep the date, because the clock hangs off it. The full sequence is on our Colorado autism IEP page.
Turning three. Early Intervention Colorado stops at age 3, and preschool special education is a different system with different eligibility. It does not roll over. A transition conference should happen by the time your child is 2 years and 9 months old, and the district runs a fresh evaluation. Colorado also has an Extended Part C Option that lets some families delay the switch until preschool actually starts. Families in that window usually land on our early intervention ABA page next.
Summer. The IEP team has to consider extended school year, but plenty of kids do not qualify. It usually turns on regression and recoupment, meaning whether your child loses skills over a long break and how long it takes to win them back. It gets decided goal by goal, and it is not summer school.
What Budding Futures actually does when your child starts school
We are an in-home provider based in Denver, and we work with families across Colorado. Aurora, Boulder, Lakewood, Arvada, Littleton, Centennial, Westminster, Fort Collins and Colorado Springs are all normal for us, and so are the towns nobody puts on a list. We do not run a center, and we do not deliver speech or occupational therapy, though we coordinate with the people who do.
We lead with the Denver school numbers above because Denver is where the data is public, not because Denver is where we stop. Whatever district your child is in, the questions on this page are the same ones.
When school starts, the job changes. Rachel Blackburn, BCBA, our Clinical Director, reworks the plan around the hours your child actually has left, and we aim the home goals at whatever is falling apart at school. If drop-off is the problem, we work drop-off. If your kid cannot ask for a break in a classroom, we teach asking for a break at your kitchen table first, because that is where they are calm enough to learn it.
With your written consent and the school's permission, we will talk to the teacher and line the goals up before an IEP meeting rather than after. What we will not do is promise you that a district will let one of our therapists into the building. Look at the Denver number again. No honest provider in Colorado can promise that, and the ones who do are selling.
Cost usually does not change when school starts. Health First Colorado covers medically necessary ABA for kids under 21 through EPSDT, and most of our Medicaid families pay nothing out of pocket. We re-verify benefits and handle the prior authorization when the hours change, which they will. More on that on our Colorado Medicaid ABA page.
If you want the mechanics of how a BCBA works with a school once everyone has said yes, that lives on our school collaboration page, and the in-building version is covered on school-based ABA therapy.
Questions Colorado parents ask when school is about to start
Will my child lose ABA hours when school starts?
Should we do one more year of ABA, or start kindergarten now?
Can my private ABA therapist come into my child's Colorado public school?
How long does a Colorado school district have to evaluate my child?
What happens to early intervention when my child turns 3?
Does Medicaid still cover ABA once my child is in school?
What is ESY, and does my child qualify over the summer?
What if the school and my BCBA disagree about goals?
Starting school and not sure what to do with the ABA hours?
Tell us your district, your child's age, and what the school day is doing to them. We will tell you honestly what we would change and whether we can help.