About Us

Our Director, Allison Cole, is a Board Certified Behavior Analyst with over a decade of experience providing comprehensive behavioral analytic and educational services to individuals, families, and schools in Northern Ohio and over 30 years of experience in the field of education. In addition to her work for Protea, Ms. Cole is currently a Lecturer at John Carroll University teaching behavioral psychology and applied behavior analysis to undergraduate and graduate students.

Before Protea’s creation in 2021, Ms. Cole completed her supervised field work in home, school, and community settings and participated in extensive trainings from the Cleveland Clinic Center for Autism in ABA, functional behavioral assessment, and teaching social interaction and cognition.

Ms. Cole returned to Cleveland, her childhood home, in 2012 from Washington DC. In Washington, she spent 2011 designing and implementing the U.S. Department of Education’s (ED) first agency-wide strategic plan for program evaluation. As part of this planning process, she consulted on numerous projects focused on the measurement and evaluation of investments in early childhood, teacher training, special education, and curricula.

From 2005-2010, Ms. Cole worked within the Office of Management and Budget in the Executive Office of the President, performing budget, performance, policy, legislative, and regulatory analyses in K-12 education. In this role, Ms. Cole designed program evaluations and performance measurement systems and played a role in the development and implementation of Federal education laws, including IDEA and the regulations governing special education processes. Before 2005, Ms. Cole worked as a researcher for multiple organizations focused on education.

Ms. Cole taught high school from 1997-2002.

Ms. Cole has a BA in English and Classical Languages (’97) and a Masters in the Art of Teaching (’99) from Duke University; a Masters in Public Policy, focused on social and education policy, from University of California, Berkeley (’05); and a Certificate in Applied Behavior Analysis from Florida Institute of Technology (’16). Allison and her husband have two children, a son in high school and a daughter in middle school.