CentralReach Acquires LiftEd, Expands PreK-12 Education Software Offering

On Jun 9, 2022

Matawan-based CentralReach, a leading provider of Autism and IDD Care Software, has acquired LiftEd, a cloud-based software that helps therapists, educators and paraprofessionals in PreK-12 public, private, and charter schools improve teaching and learning outcomes for students diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and related intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD). As part of the acquisition, LiftEd founders, Joanne Hill Powell, Ph.D., BCBA-D and Andrew Hill, will join CentralReach serving in strategic positions within the company’s special education software division.

LiftEd empowers Individualized Education Program or Plan (IEP) teams to seamlessly manage Applied Behavior Analysis-based (ABA) curriculum, record data, and access information about student progress, thereby providing critical real-time insights to drive instructional decisions and behavioral interventions for students. LiftEd will be integrated into CentralReach’s Autism and IDD Care PlatformTM for Special Education.

“The challenge for teachers, paraprofessionals, administrators and therapists today is demonstrating, in a data-driven way, that the decisions and programs used in the classroom are positively impacting each student’s progress on IEP goals. The legacy solutions that are trying to solve this problem today are expensive, hard to use, and require professionals to manually connect the assessment data, IEP goals and ABA programming via multiple, non-integrated point solutions, creating workflow headaches and limiting outcomes for students,” said CentralReach CEO, Chris Sullens.

“LiftEd’s purpose-built product, in combination with CentralReach’s assessment and digital curricula solutions, enables educators to solve this challenge in a holistic, intuitive, and affordable way by pulling IEP goals directly into its application, aligning all curricula and data collection to those goals, attributing performance back to the goals, and finally, updating progress against those goals in the school’s existing IEP system,” Sullens said. “With LiftEd, educators have a powerful tool that enables them to more easily comply with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and create reports and customizable graphs to visualize student progress and guide discussions with parents.”

Sullens further noted, “In the short time that LiftEd has been on the market, Joanne and Andrew have transformed it from idea to innovative disruptor and I can’t wait to leverage their expertise and our prior acquisitions and investments to create the most complete, integrated, and intuitive special education platform in the market.”

The opportunity to rapidly scale LiftEd is also shared by the company’s founders.

“At LiftEd, we’ve been centered by our mission to deliver special education software that drives successful student outcomes,” commented Dr. Powell. “So, when Andrew and I saw how closely CentralReach’s mission aligned to ours, we knew that it was the right company to help usher LiftEd into its next phase of growth. We are excited to join CentralReach and integrate LiftEd into more school partnerships supporting IEP implementation and student success inside and outside the classroom.”

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