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Two bills this legislative session that were meant to tighten oversight and regulation of a specific type of therapy for autism spectrum disorder were stripped of the provisions that would have done so.
Those two bills are still being considered by legislators—but with few of the consumer protections the champions of the bills hoped for.
Applied behavioral analysis is a relatively new and popular type of therapy for those on the spectrum, and has become the preferred type of therapy in the field.
While individual ABA therapists are required to be licensed and registered in Oregon with the Behavior Analysis Regulatory Board (a board that was created in 2013), centers or agencies that practice or employ ABA therapists are not licensed under any board or agency with the state.
That means that if there’s misconduct or concerns about a center where ABA is practiced, there’s no body to which those concerns can be reported or investigated by.
Such gaps in regulation prompted lawmakers and advocates to start exploring ways to better regulate places that offer ABA therapy. Two bills in the current legislative session originally intended to do that. Both have been heavily amended to take out provisions that would provide tighter regulation, but Sen. Sara Gelser, who championed one of the bills, tells WW she’s intent on introducing a bill next spring that would tighten oversight in Oregon.
Senate Bill 358: The bill was introduced by longtime advocate Paul Terdal, who has two sons with autism. The bill had provisions that would have required ABA providers to report to the board if they had a criminal conviction, would require they be mandatory reporters of child abuse, and give the board an official advisory role on discipline and enforcement.
Essentially, Terdal explains, it would allow the board to more tightly regulate providers of ABA: “The board essentially doesn’t have a whole lot of enforcement power.”
On Monday, June 21, the bill was stripped of all those provisions by the Capital Construction Subcommittee of Ways and Means.
What the bill did preserve is its extension that requires health insurance coverage for ABA therapy until 2030. The coverage was set to sunset this year.
Terdal tells WW the stripped provisions leave “gaping holes in consumer protections” for ABA therapy.
Senate Bill 710: The bill is championed by Sen. Gelser, an advocate for disability rights. In its original iteration it would have required centers and agencies that provide ABA therapy to be licensed through a state agency.
Gelser tells WW that she “originally intended to address some ABA issues in [the bill], but it really was unwieldy given that the bill was predominantly about the troubled-teen industry. I decided early on to strip the bill of the ABA provisions and bring those issues back through a workgroup in a future session in a bill that was focused specifically on issues related to this practice.”
In the original bill draft, Gelser recommended the Department of Human Services be the regulatory agency for ABA centers, effectively licensing them as child caring agencies.
But ABA therapists expressed to Gelser that they didn’t want to be licensed as child caring agencies. “They didn’t understand why they would be regulated by DHS,” Gelser says. ”It became really clear really fast that it was too much to add into that bill.”
Gelser said she plans on creating a workgroup to craft a bill for next spring that would increase ABA oversight: “We do very much need to come back and address regulatory issues for this practice area.”