A History of Helping Educators Help ALL Students Succeed
In the spring of 1987, Carol Beck, a special education teacher in Anderson, South Carolina, suggested to her husband Don that the tedious three-part paper IEP forms she was working on could perhaps be completed on the computer.
As the school district’s Director of Computing Services, Don rose to the challenge and developed a piece of school administration software that was then called Special Education Planner.
In 1992 Don, together with colleague Bob Read, founded Horizon Software Systems to provide the program, renamed EXCENT®, to districts nationwide. (Now retired to pursue volunteer work, Don’s values and dedication remain at the heart of the GET philosophy.)
Meanwhile, in Burlington, Vermont, Dan Herman, an experienced creator of educational technology, began focusing his attention on cost-effective, people-oriented special education solutions.
Dan founded Tera Systems in 1986 and worked closely with the State of Vermont to develop MasterTrack Student Manager, which in1995 received an exclusive endorsement from the National Council of Administrators of Special Education (CASE). MasterTrack later became Tera Systems Student Manager.
In 2001, after the enactment of the No Child Left Behind Act, experienced education and business professionals Scott Shickler and Michael Schaefer came together to found a new educational software company, Global Education Technologies (GET). Their mission was to leverage technology to make special needs student data more accessible and useful in improving the lives of students and teachers.
GET acquired Horizon Software Systems in 2002 and Tera Systems in 2003. The three groups immediately began working together and broadened the product range to include Response to Intervention (RtI) management, as well as special education management, assessment management, and Medicaid reimbursement solutions, based on the needs and input of educators.