TeachTown 2025: Progress That Matters

There’s no slow season in special education.

The work is complex, constant, and profoundly important. Every day, teachers, specialists, and administrators show up with patience, creativity, and heart, finding ways to make learning work for every student, no matter what the day brings. At TeachTown, we know this isn’t easy work. It’s the best and hardest job there is, and we’re endlessly grateful to be part of the solution.

This year, our focus was clear: build curriculum and platform tools that make teaching smoother, data smarter, and learning more accessible. Together, we celebrated some of our biggest achievements yet: the completion of two brand-new solutions (Launch for PreK and Language Accelerator), a comprehensive set of 300+ benchmark assessments across K-12, the addition of Spanish content and decodable readers in enCORE Elementary, and a complete refresh of the enCORE user experience designed to make lesson prep faster, personalize the teaching experience, and make the whole navigation experience more intuitive.

These aren’t just product milestones. They’re steps toward a bigger goal – giving educators more time for what matters most and giving students the tools to reach their fullest potential. We built, refined, and rethought our solutions this year with one simple principle in mind: great teaching deserves great support.

With that in mind, we organized our 2025 work around the following: making it easy, expanding our impact, and proving what works – all focused on helping educators spend less time managing and more time teaching.

Making It Easy

We know time is the rarest resource in special education, so we spent 2025 giving some of it back!

  • The enCORE Glow Up! We unveiled a whole new look and feel for enCORE. This refresh is a thoughtfully redesigned user experience that makes teaching easier, faster, and more intuitive. Whether you’re navigating through lessons, prepping your day, or customizing your view, enCORE now gets you there with fewer clicks and less hassle.
  • Quick Start for Tech Lessons released earlier this year and made it possible for teachers to launch student-led technology lessons right from the curriculum tab. This is a small but powerful improvement that saves time and strengthens data collection.
  • Assistive Technology Scanning is now built right into the TeachTown platform, making lessons accessible for students who use single switches and giving teachers richer engagement data.
  • We also added a self-paced Assistive Technology course in the Resource Center. This asynchronous professional development resource offers practical, no-fluff PD designed to help educators integrate tools that increase student independence and communication.

Every update was built to remove friction and keep focus where it belongs: on teaching and learning.

Expanding Impact

This year, our curriculum grew in new and meaningful ways to meet more learners where they are.

  • Launch for PreK is a comprehensive, inclusive early childhood curriculum that delivers two full years of bell-to-bell instruction and assessment for all learners ages 3–5. It was designed specifically for students with developmental delays and disabilities and the peers who learn alongside them, ensuring that every child can access meaningful, developmentally appropriate learning experiences from the very start. For the first time, all early childhood students can learn together and at their own pace!

Tour Launch for PreK

  • Language Accelerator is a personalized, technology-based language and communication intervention that helps SLPs and educators work together to deliver high-quality language instruction at scale. Language Accelerator bridges the gap between therapy and classroom learning, giving every student more opportunities to build expressive and receptive language in a consistent, data-driven way.

Check Out Language Accelerator

  • TeachTown Chronicles in enCORE enhances learning of current events in classrooms in an accessible, student-friendly weekly periodical format. Each edition of the TeachTown Chronicles builds background knowledge of timely news stories, supports comprehension, and encourages thoughtful discussion around age-appropriate news stories.
  • Extended School Year 2025: With the theme, ‘Summer Around the World,’ 2025 ESY gave students and teachers a season of cultural exploration and fun learning while delivering academic instruction to support maintenance of key skills.
  • We added Decodable Readers in enCORE Elementary! These texts are designed to build reading confidence by focusing on the phonics and sight words students already know.

 

Decodable Readers

 

  • Spanish resources expanded across enCORE Elementary, with 72 adapted library books now available in Spanish at multiple levels and in multiple formats with corresponding comprehension practice and vocabulary support, aiding multilingual learners and their families.
  • And the new organization to enCORE Elementary ELA includes the Every Day ELA segment that combines daily instruction in sight words, phonics, vocabulary, and book reading to ensure consistent, research-aligned literacy instruction, grounded in the Science of Reading. Learn more.

Every update this year was made with one purpose in mind: to give teachers practical tools that make it easier to reach every learner and help every student see themselves in the work they do.

Proving What Works

We’ve always been committed to showing that our solutions lead to measurable student outcomes and a quantifiable return on investment. To that end, this year included:

  • The expansion of TeachTown Benchmark Assessments, which now total more than 300 across K-12, including new middle and high school additions and with Science and Social Studies benchmarks coming soon. Our benchmark assessments measure single, discrete skills and allow teachers to see individual student progress over time and demonstrate growth, supporting progress monitoring towards IEP goals and targeted instruction. Plus, administrators can utilize the admin export to analyze instructional effectiveness across schools to target professional development and coaching.
  • Our new Unit Assessment Summary Report gives administrators an at-a-glance view of student growth on enCORE unit assessments across schools, grade bands, and academic domains through interactive visualizations. This report helps administrators demonstrate ROI and supports teacher incentive models.

  • Domain-specific assessments in enCORE Elementary that let teachers focus on one subject at a time, giving a clearer picture of student strengths and needs.

When we say ‘data-driven,’ we mean data that drives instruction and program evaluation – not just numbers on a screen.

Seeing Progress in Action: Partner District Stories

Real progress is seen in real classrooms with real students and real outcome data. This year, we had the privilege of partnering with districts who are leading the way in redefining what’s possible for students with diverse learning needs.

In the San Mateo County Office of Education, special educators piloted TeachTown’s K-12 standards-first, adapted core curriculum, enCORE, alongside another special education curriculum, to ensure its students received high-quality instruction and opportunities for enhanced student success. enCORE led to improved data and outcomes, decreased problem behaviors, and excellent customer support.

  • Monthly mastery levels for students using enCORE increased between 12-50%
  • Behavior Emergency Reports (BERs) across classrooms using enCORE decreased by ~42%
  • Average response time for TeachTown team members to reply to San Mateo County Office of Education admins’ email correspondence was ~0.8 days

At Patchogue-Medford School District, teachers and administrators showed how enCORE and supporting tools are driving measurable gains in student engagement and academic growth. In fact, 93% of students who used enCORE scored proficient on the New York State Alternate Assessment (NYSAA) compared to 63% of students using a competitor.  Their success story continues to inspire our entire team!

We also celebrated meaningful milestones with Redford Union School District, Pflugerville ISD, and YES Prep, each demonstrating unique ways that TeachTown supports consistent, high-quality instruction and increased confidence for both students and educators.

Each of these districts reminds us that the best measure of our work is in the moments when students are truly connecting with their learning and seeing real outcomes – not in new product features or releases.

By the Numbers

Behind every number is a story of students and educators making real progress: a Level 1 student finding their voice; a brand new teacher finding their rhythm and gaining instructional confidence; a whole class celebrating end-of-year progress that once felt out of reach; an administrator seeing the return on their investment in TeachTown.

Looking Ahead

What we’re building in 2026 is all about continuing the work that matters: helping special educators across PreK – 12+ do their jobs with clarity, confidence, and joy. To every teacher, specialist, and administrator who trusted TeachTown this year: thank you. You inspire every improvement we make!

Here’s to 2026: more learning, more growth, and more moments that remind us why we do this.

🎥 See the highlights for yourself

Watch our 2025 Year-in-Review video and celebrate the progress made in classrooms across the country.

Watch the Video to Learn More

💬 Share your own TeachTown story

Post your favorite classroom moment from 2025 on social using #TeachTownTogether – we’d love to feature your work in the year ahead.

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