NECC marked 50 years in 2025. Frank Ciccone has been there for 30 of them, and has spent the last fifteen taking its ACE ABA Software System to market.
Key Takeaways
- Training built the tenure. Ciccone arrived with no background in behavior analysis and earned a master’s degree onsite while working. He credits mentorship rather than pay for the three decades that followed.
- Reach, not real estate. NECC’s partner classrooms and its ACE software grew out of the same constraint: a campus can hold only so many students.
- A school-built product in a clinic-built market. ACE was designed for public school teams rather than insurance-funded clinics, and Ciccone says demand tracks special education funding and the local supply of behavior analysts.
- AI measured against one test. Ciccone says his team is weighing artificial intelligence against student outcomes rather than adding features to keep pace with other platforms.
The advertisement ran in the help wanted pages of the Boston Globe, back when that was where jobs were found, and Frank Ciccone can still see it. He had just finished at the University of Massachusetts Amherst with a degree in psychology and biology. He was living on Cape Cod, his girlfriend at the time (now his wife) was from Westborough, and he had family in Worcester. A school in Southborough was hiring people to work with children.
“I can kind of picture the ad even now,” he told Acuity, in an interview at NECC’s Southborough campus.
He had taken a few behavioral learning classes in college. Beyond that, he did not know that applied behavior analysis existed as a field or as a way to teach. There was no credential to know about yet. The Behavior Analyst Certification Board was incorporated in 1998 and began taking over certification the following year. What he knew was that the job involved kids and that Southborough was close enough to the people he wanted to stay near. “Working with kids, I could do that,” he remembered thinking. “I liked the idea of helping kids, so I said, all right, I’ll give this a try. No idea that I would be there for a year, or what turns into 30 years.”
He moved in with family in Worcester and took the job. That was three decades ago. Ciccone, a Board Certified Behavior Analyst, is now Director of Growth and Partnerships at The New England Center for Children, the Southborough nonprofit that has spent fifty years building autism education, research, and staff training into a single operation. He no longer works with students. He sells and supports the software that carries NECC’s curriculum into public schools in other states.
His career runs along the seams of a question providers and districts are still working out: how an organization that does clinical work well converts that expertise into something others can use, and what it gives up in the conversion.
ABA Training and Onsite Graduate Programs Built a 30-Year Career at NECC
NECC was founded in 1975 by L. Vincent Strully Jr., along with Dudley Orr and John Pangburn, as the Efficacy Research Institute on the grounds of Taunton State Hospital, according to the organization’s published history. It moved to Southborough in 1986 and took its current name in 1996. Strully served as Chief Executive Officer for 48 years before Dr. Jessica Sassi succeeded him in 2023. He remains Founder and Executive Advisor and sits on the board of directors.
By the time Ciccone answered the ad, NECC had a preschool, a day school, and a residential program. He started on September 6, 1996, in the residential program, in what the organization then called a level one position, working afternoons and overnights at a house in Westborough with one day a week at the school so he could learn that environment too.
“I came in with nothing, no knowledge,” he said. “I think that’s the thing that I look back on the most, is how generous the people who I started working with were with their time and their knowledge.”
Two things happened in those first years. The first was an intensive onboarding program and the mentorship that came with it, which Ciccone still describes in strong terms. “The mentorship aspect of what the New England Center offers, I think, is second only to what the New England Center does for the students,” he said. He remembers his early supervisors by name and can picture their faces. He also remembers the moment the ground shifted under him. “You don’t know you know nothing until you learn what you didn’t know.”
The second was school. NECC runs graduate programs on its own campus through university partnerships, an arrangement that lets staff earn degrees while they work. Ciccone went through the master’s program in applied behavior analysis that NECC then ran with Northeastern University, established in 1992 according to the organization’s timeline. The onsite options have shifted since. NECC is winding down its partnership with Western New England University and partnering with Northeastern again, alongside a Simmons University program leading to a master’s in education with a severe disabilities licensure. Ciccone said the degrees are not free but heavily subsidized by NECC, which says more than 1,870 professionals have earned master’s degrees through its programs.
Research followed, and arrived the same way everything else had, through someone offering. Ciccone was working on the research component of his degree when Dr. Richard Graff, a behavior analyst at the center, asked if he wanted to talk about it. “What do you mean? I really have no idea what this is,” Ciccone recalled answering. He worked with Graff and with Dr. William Ahearn, NECC’s Director of Research since 2002, and ended up with five peer-reviewed papers on stimulus preference assessment, the last of them in the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis in 2015. “I never would have done any of this stuff if it wasn’t for the center, and Bill and Rick,” he said.
The students are what he brings up first when the conversation turns to that period. “I remember their faces, I remember their names, I remember the small accomplishments and the big accomplishments with all of those kids,” he said. Many of the children he worked with were not verbal, which he described as changing the shape of the communication rather than ending it. He also remembers the parents thanking him, and his own discomfort at being thanked for doing his job.
For a trade that struggles to keep people, that combination is unusual. In a field still arguing about how much training a new technician actually needs, the structure is the interesting part. Research findings move into the curriculum, the curriculum moves into staff training, and staff trained on site fill the classrooms that generate the next round of questions. Ciccone’s own path, from overnight shifts to published author, ran straight through that loop.
The loop also has an exit, and NECC treats it as a feature. Many staff leave after a few years for public schools, private schools, or insurance-funded agencies. Ciccone says he cannot attend a conference without meeting someone who trained at the center, and that agency leaders tell him they like hiring NECC alumni, a different posture from a field that increasingly rents its leadership development from outside. At the New Hampshire ABA conference this fall, he ran into a former colleague he had not seen in twenty-five years, and they started in on a student they had worked with together.
NECC Partner Classrooms Put ABA Into Public Schools Without Moving Students
After eight years in the residential program, Ciccone moved in 2004 to what NECC calls public school services. The department does three things: consultation for districts that need help with a particular student, a classroom, or an ABA program; training for school staff; and partner classrooms, which is where Ciccone landed.
The partner classroom model places a NECC-run special education classroom inside a public school. NECC hires the lead teacher and provides clinical and educational supervision, while the district hires the paraprofessional staff who work in the room. Ciccone was one of the supervisors, in a different classroom each day of the week, with each classroom seeing him once a week for a full day. He noted that he was describing the program as it operated fifteen years ago and that details have likely changed since.
The point of the model is that a student who might otherwise be placed out of district stays at the home school, and that shaped how the classrooms were run. “We just wanted it to be another classroom at the school,” Ciccone said, rather than a program visibly operated by an outside organization. It meant learning each district’s particulars, a discovery for someone who had known only one building. “Every school district’s a little different. Okay, got to figure that out.”
It also meant a kind of persuasion he had not done before, narrower than an argument about methodology. “Not everybody wants to hear what ABA is,” he said. What colleagues wanted to know was why that classroom looked different from the others. His answer was that it was not, particularly. “At the end of the day, all we’re doing is teaching skills, and it’s just a style that we use,” he said. “It’s a really effective evidence-based way to teach.” His summary of the approach: “Less ‘let me tell you about ABA’ and more ‘come see how we teach.’”
NECC now runs 17 residential houses and 70 partner classrooms across New England.
How the ACE ABA Software System Left NECC’s Campus
The fourth division at NECC, after education, staff training, and research, is technology. The ACE ABA Software System, originally known as the Autism Curriculum Encyclopedia, began as an internal tool. NECC staff wanted a better way to do what they were already doing: assess a student, decide what to teach, build the lessons, and track whether any of it was working. By the organization’s own account, the curriculum before that lived in a binder, and the digital version was built on a grant from the Doug Flutie Jr. Foundation for Autism in 1998. The first lesson was published in 2003.
Then visitors started asking for it. NECC hosts tours and professional visits regularly, and according to Ciccone, families and outside agencies who saw the software in use wanted to know whether they could have it too.
Ciccone traces the decision to Strully’s standing objective, which was to reach more children. NECC’s campus, a 133,000 square foot facility in Southborough, has a ceiling. “There’s a limit to how many kids you can help, no matter the size of your building,” Ciccone said. “The physical space is full.” Partner classrooms had stretched the organization past that first limit by putting NECC staff in other people’s schools. Software was the next step, and it removed a second limit. “If we want to help more kids, we need to eliminate the need for a New England Center person,” he said.
The software had already begun leaving the building in stages. NECC’s timeline puts its first move into New England public school classrooms in 2006, a New York City pilot in 2009, and the patent in 2011. What did not exist was anyone whose job was to sell it. Ciccone was in public school services when NECC went looking, and he moved to ACE in 2011. His first move was to admit what he did not know. “I was a behavior analyst. At the time, I didn’t know anything about marketing and sales,” he said. He hired Steven Tower, now Director of ACE Marketing and Communications, and the two have run that side of the product ever since.
Between them, Ciccone said, they appear at roughly 25 conferences a year, from the national meetings held by the Association for Behavior Analysis International and the Association of Professional Behavior Analysts down to the state and regional events that have multiplied lately. A conversation at a booth becomes a Zoom overview, which becomes a trial.
What they are selling is a front-to-back clinical and educational system rather than a data collection app: assessments that help teams identify skill deficits and build an individualized education program, a library of pre-built lesson plans tied to those results, and the data collection, graphing, and reporting that follow. Ciccone put the library at more than 2,000 lessons, each customizable. The pitch to a school team is that the sequence, what to teach, how to teach it, and whether it worked, is already connected, so a Board Certified Behavior Analyst is not building every lesson from scratch. Whether that reaches a classroom still depends on the rollout, and what decides an ABA software rollout usually happens before the contract.
The product is patented, and NECC describes it as a nonprofit product whose proceeds return to research and education. The organization reported in late 2025 that more than 14,000 learners worldwide use ACE in schools, hospitals, and universities, including 16 higher education programs training future behavior analysts, up from 10,000 learners in 2021. Ciccone put the current footprint at 26 states and 11 countries.
NECC’s reach outside Massachusetts is not limited to software. It has operated in Abu Dhabi since the 1990s, an expansion that began, by its own account, with a referral from Boston Children’s Hospital, and now runs a school there modeled on Southborough along with regional clinics. Staff there use ACE as well.
School-Based ABA Software in a Market Built for Insurance-Funded Clinics
Most ABA software is built for insurance-funded providers, where the reporting requirements, the billing, and the buyer all look different, and where outside capital has been moving into clinic-facing platforms. Ciccone does not treat that as a rivalry so much as a different address. “We come from a school. We know teaching. We know skill acquisition,” he said. “That’s what our expertise is in, and that’s what we built into the software.”
The distinction is not only about features. It is about where the money comes from and who has to be persuaded. When Ciccone is asked why some states take to the product and others do not, his answer has two parts, and neither is about the software.
The first is special education funding. Specialized programs cost money, and states vary in how much they prioritize that spending. He named Massachusetts as one that does.
The second is workforce. “You can’t have ABA if there are no people who know how to do ABA,” he said. States with several graduate-level behavior analysis programs produce more Board Certified Behavior Analysts, some of whom go to work in public schools, though the national certification pipeline is under strain. Where both conditions hold, funding and trained people, there is something for a tool like ACE to attach to. Where either is missing, as in states with the thinnest behavior analyst workforces, there is not.
The demand is not in question. About 7.5 million students were served under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act in the 2022 to 2023 school year, roughly 15 percent of public school enrollment, with autism accounting for 13 percent of that group, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated in April 2025 that about 1 in 31 eight-year-olds had been identified with autism spectrum disorder. What varies by state is not the number of students. It is whether the adults in the building have the training and the budget to do anything specialized with it.
NECC’s own use of the product gives the arrangement an unusual shape. The center runs ACE on campus and in its partner classrooms every day. “It’s almost like the New England Center is our biggest client,” Ciccone said. Feedback from outside users goes to the engineering team that builds the software in house, and findings from the research department at the John and Diane Kim Autism Institute feed the curriculum. It is a closed loop of the kind the wider field is only now trying to build through published outcome data. A school district buying ACE is buying access to that loop without hiring anyone from Southborough.
AI in ABA Software, Measured Against Student Outcomes
AI is already inside ACE, and Ciccone said the open question at NECC is not whether to use it but how far it can usefully go.
“This is still something that even we are still trying to figure out,” he said. The team is looking at how AI might extend the reach of what NECC does, or make the tools easier for school staff to use, on the theory that easier tools reach more students. What he rejects is adoption for its own sake. “Not just slapping AI in there to say we have AI in there,” he said. “How can we make it functional within the software that we have?”
He drew one firm line. NECC does not believe AI is currently capable of replacing a behavior analyst’s clinical judgment, Ciccone said, but he sees a long list of ways it can support the work behavior analysts are already doing.
He does not treat opting out as available either. “It’s transforming so many other industries already. It’s not something we can ignore.”
The test he applies is the one he applies to everything else, and he called it the practical advantage of working somewhere with a single stated goal. “The focus is and continues to be student outcomes,” he said. “We are evolving ACE to leverage AI where it provides the most value to that end.”
That is a statement about process rather than product. It does not tell a district what ACE will ship or when, but it does say what question the team is asking.
NECC at 50: The Institution Behind the Software
Ciccone’s thirty years sit inside a longer count. NECC marked its 50th anniversary in 2025, five decades after it opened in August 1975 with six students, three staff, and a delayed $30,000 state contract, in a borrowed building on the grounds of Taunton State Hospital. The organization now reports about 1,200 employees and says it supports more than 15,000 individuals with autism worldwide.
The Southborough campus is a 133,000 square foot facility that includes an aquatics center, built so students can be taught water safety, and the John and Diane Kim Autism Institute, which houses the research operation. Ciccone walked Acuity past the pool on the way in.
The anniversary was marked with a gala in Boston that NECC says raised $1.5 million for its annual fund, and the evening premiered a short film about the organization, One Powerful Place, narrated by Jon Stewart. Stewart plays a narrator who keeps getting the story wrong before landing on it, and the piece runs through fifty years of treatment work, teacher training, advocacy, and the software Ciccone sells to schools.
Toward the end of the interview, Ciccone pulled it up on his laptop and played it. He said afterward that it captures something he has trouble putting into words himself: “the feeling you get working here.”
ABA Workforce Retention: What Kept Ciccone at NECC for 30 Years
Tenure like Ciccone’s is unusual in a field with well-documented turnover, but he declined the premise that it makes him remarkable. “I’m not a rarity,” he said. “There are a lot of people here who have been here for 30 years or more.” NECC made a version of the same point in its 50th anniversary magazine, which reported that nearly 100 employees have stayed 20 years or more.
Asked what kept him, he gave three reasons in order.
The first was the students, and the shape of that reason has changed over time. Early on it was direct: a child he worked with made progress, and a parent said so. Now it is secondhand, arriving through the notes that circulate internally when a family writes in. He does not pretend the two feel the same. What he says is that the contact became more diffuse and, he hopes, wider.
The second was the people, which is where his account returns to mentorship. The same generosity he received in his first years is what he describes as still operating, including from the executive team. NECC’s own explanation of its retention runs along similar lines, crediting professional development and benefits built around keeping experienced staff, among them an on-site child care center that opened in the early 1990s and is named for the father of Michael S. Downey, the organization’s Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Downey put the logic plainly in that account: rather than losing staff as they gain experience, NECC keeps them, and their children sometimes end up working there too.
The third was that the work kept changing. “It never got stale,” he said. He has held several distinct jobs across three departments, and at each turn the organization gave him something he did not already know how to do. The current job has the same quality, despite being, on paper, the same task for fifteen years. “Every year is different,” he said. A new feature needs a new explanation, a conference presence needs rebuilding, a district asks about something the team has never had to describe.
There is a trade underneath all three, and Ciccone named it without prompting. The reward that got him into the work was watching a particular child learn something. The reward available now is a district adopting a system that might do that for students he will never meet. He called it a different kind of satisfaction, and he did not describe the two as equivalent.
At the end of the interview, he returned to the beginning, to the person who read the ad. “I think back on that kid who started here, and why did they hire me? I didn’t know anything,” he said. “But they said, all right, take a chance on him.”
Asked what he would tell someone entering the field now, Ciccone, whose job includes representing NECC to people who have never heard of it, answered without qualification. “If anybody is looking to get into the field and they want the best mentors and the best training, come to the New England Center.”
