Article: Assessing and Treating Elopement in a School Setting. By Phillips and others, in Teaching Exceptional Children, 50, 6, 2018.
Some of the content of this article is not terribly relevant to the main purpose of this blog, but I ended up reading this article and noting something familiar. As you may or may not know, elopement is running or wandering away from a supervised area. It can be a broad term, but the results of elopement are specific including risk of harm to the eloper. I wanted to note that the first step in treating elopement is the first step in treating many problem behaviors: adequate assessment of the situation. Technically, this process is called a Functional Behavior Assessment (FBA). I was trained to do a Functional Assessment of Behavior (FA), but it is basically all the same. I think I have mentioned this elsewhere, but an adequate FA will produce options for treatment. People who look like they are wizards at behavior management often are actually highly skilled at performing the initial behavioral assessment.
The good news is that getting good at FBA is actually straightforward and something I would even recommend in a beginner parenting class. One does not have to be a professional to be good at functional assessment of behavior.