Executive Directors

Andrew Bailey, MA, MFT
Executive Director and Director of Educational Services

Andrew Bailey is an experienced clinician and highly skilled educational consultant who has devoted the past twenty years of his life to working with children. After completing his undergraduate studies, Mr. Bailey began his career in special education in 1985 at a private special education school in Berkeley, California. While progressing from a paraprofessional instructor to special education teacher during his graduate studies, Mr. Bailey gained a solid understanding of Neurodevelopmental impairments, particularly in the area of Autism Spectrum Disorders. Several years before the “autism explosion” became a widely accepted phenomenon, Mr. Bailey was designing and implementing innovative educational and behavioral programs for children with autism.

After completing his graduate studies in 1991, Mr. Bailey turned his attention to achieving licensure as a marriage and family therapist and expanding his skills in the area of psychotherapy, clinical consultation, and professional training. Mr. Bailey has performed many hundreds of hours of therapy and other direct clinical services with children and adults with diverse abilities and backgrounds. Additionally, Mr. Bailey has created and implemented several training series for parents and professionals that have been very well received at venues statewide. After licensure as a Marriage and Family Therapist in 1994, Mr. Bailey relocated to the Sonoma County area and began working fulltime as a behavior analyst and educational consultant with a local nonprofit. During the next five years Mr. Bailey developed collaborative relationships with other professionals and expanded his expertise in the area of treatment of Autism Spectrum Disorders. It was also during this time that Mr. Bailey, reflecting fondly on his experiences as a private school employee, began to dream of opening his own private school for children with autism. In the spring of 2000, Mr. Bailey along with William Henkel and Mary Beth Ludwig opened Anova Education and Behavior Consultation, with very few resources beyond a mutual love of children, a desire a learn and grow personally, and fierce passion for excellence.

Andrew Bailey MA, MFT has been licensed as a Marriage and Family Therapist since 1994 and has been practicing as an educational and behavioral consultant for several years. Mr. Bailey earned his Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology from the University of Cincinnati in 1985 and his Master’s Degree in Clinical Psychology from John F. Kennedy University in 1991. Mr. Bailey is one of the founding directors of Anova Education and Behavior Consultation and is currently the Director of Educational Services and the Principal of the ACE School. Mr. Bailey originally designed the concept of “Multidisciplinary Treatment of Neurodevelopmental Impairments in a Private Educational Setting” that has been pioneered at the Anova Center for Education over the past two years. Mr. Bailey conceived the ACE School as a unique environment that would provide high quality academic instruction to emotionally challenged children, using best practices from Positive Behavior Intervention, Sensory Integration, Cognitive Therapy, Speech/Language Therapy, and Theory of Mind.
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William Henkel MA, BCBA
Executive Director, Secretary and Director of Community Services

William Henkel first became acquainted with students with developmental disabilities as a 7th grader working on a Boy Scout community service project. As an undergraduate student in Psychology, William volunteered as a classroom aide for an off-campus preschool serving developmentally disabled children and began to attend classes focused on autism research. After acceptance into the Master’s program, William’s interest in autism continued. He worked in residential homes for children with severe behavior problems and there he received his first intensive on-the-job instruction in the theories and practice of applied behavior analysis. Over the months of constant contact working multiple shifts William developed a great respect for the humanity of these children and a profound curiosity about their view of the world. His affiliation with these children provided inspiration for the completion of his Master’s thesis studying the effects of innovative reinforcement strategies on skill building in autistic children.

Since the completion of his Master’s degree, William’s career has focused on the use of applied behavior analysis to develop creative strategies to reduce problem behaviors and teach adaptive skills. After several years in the field, William petitioned to become one of the first Board Certified Behavior Analysts in the state of California. He has worked as a behavior analyst and program administrator for respected agencies throughout Northern California, serving individuals with autism and other neuro-developmental impairments in their family homes, adult programs, and public and non-public schools. His work for the last 12 years as a behavior consultant has provided him with opportunities to develop behavior interventions to address severe behavior problems and improve classroom performance, to help families with children on the autism spectrum receive intensive early intervention and parent training, to provide full-inclusion services to public school students with a variety of disabilities and unique needs, and to develop innovative social skills & social cognition training services and systems. William is an experienced presenter, having provided hundreds of hours of in-service presentations and workshops on behavior management techniques, including three presentations for the California Association for Behavior Analysis. William continues to be an advocate for innovative research and is currently completing his dissertation for his Ph.D in Developmental Psychology.

William currently serves as Executive Director, and the Director of Behavior Analysis Services. In addition, he is the Behavior Analyst consulting with classrooms at the Anova Center for Education, Anova’s non-public school in Sonoma County. He is committed to assuring that the services provided in each of Anova’s programs are of the highest caliber.
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Mary Beth Ludwig, CPA
Executive Director, Chief Operating Officer and Director of Financial Services
Mary Beth Ludwig is a highly skilled accountant with an astute business mind, a drive to build successful and unique projects, and a deep love for children and families. Ms. Ludwig has firsthand knowledge of the challenges faced by parents of disabled children, being the mother of a severely handicapped son. Her experience as a builder of unique business projects combined with her intense desire to work for the welfare of local families have worked for the benefit of Anova and the entire community. Ms. Ludwig left a highly successful career in public accounting to follow her dream of building a different kind of business project, one that would offer help to her son and family while creating services that may benefit others in need. She initially volunteered many hundreds of hours of her own time to helping Anova develop our business practices before realizing that she was performing a labor of love and needed to move fulltime into the business of managing a nonprofit. Anova has grown successfully over the past five years in large part due to Ms. Ludwig’s numerous connections within the local banking community and her deserved reputation as an accountant with unsurpassed budgeting and financial reporting abilities. However, Anova has probably grown in larger measure due to the enormity of Ms. Ludwig’s heart and the quality of the commitment that she shares with other parents and professionals on a daily basis.

Ms. Ludwig has worked in several capacities in the business world over the past fifteen years, culminating in her practice as a Certified Public Accountant over the past seven years. Ms. Ludwig has developed and implemented business and management practices that have helped several local businesses grow rapidly into profitable entities that are able to maintain themselves efficiently using her models. Ms. Ludwig has worked extensively within the local public accounting, legal, and banking communities as a professional, parent, and concerned community member.

Mary Beth Ludwig, CPA, graduated with a Bachelor of Accountancy from the University of San Diego in 1992. Ms. Ludwig then received a coveted position as a tax specialist with the prestigious accounting firm KPMG Pete Marwick in San Diego, California before receiving certification as a public accountant in 1999.
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