ten absorb the excess, sometimes up to 25% of total local K–12 spending (forbes.com). The fact that there has been an increase in student identifica- tion increase while a continued decrease in funding is paradoxi- cal. In short – do more with less. This is not a formula for success in the special education community – this is the polar opposite and sets up students and teachers for frustration and failure. LET’S LOOK AT A SOLUTION ~ BOOM PASSPORT BOOM LEARNING – NOT ONLY AN ACADEMIC SOLUTION BUT A TRUE EDUCATIONAL PARTNER Mary and Eric Oemig invented Boom Cards to help students who needed extra support or were behind with some skills. Little did they know when they founded the company in 2012 that by 2025, they would have more than 1 million educators utilizing their platform and 12 million students that have interacted with Boom Cards more than 3 billion times. Boom Cards have turned out to be exceptional for all learners, especially those needing extra supports and powerful for educators and therapists. From the start of Boom Learning through COVID, Boom Learn- ing’s focus was to support individual teachers and their class- rooms through Boom Cards, and they have demonstrated amaz- ing results with over 1.2 million teachers relying on the platform. In 2023 Mary and Eric wanted to support entire schools and school districts and thus developed Boom Passport, a collection
of curated content that provides special education teachers with access to tens of thousands of standard-based, differentiated and data driven lessons and activities. “Boom Learning truly understands the hurdles that individual teachers and school districts are struggling with right now. Our mission is to support our district partners with quality content and industry leading technology and training tools”, said John Standal, Vice President of Growth. “Start Teaching, Stop Searching” - Boom Passport was de- veloped to support the needs of special education classroom teachers and address many of these instructional, school and/ or district level issues. Boom Passport teachers can access over 80,000 standard-based lessons covering Pre-K-Transition exten- sion activities addressing: reading, writing, math, science, social studies, transitional and related service topics. Passport also of- fers teachers the ability to simply modify or differentiate lessons and assign them to individual students, small groups or entire classrooms to build student agency. Boom Passport gives the ed- ucator tools to collect benchmark and ongoing student data to check/modify their instructional trajectory and/or track student growth or regression. Often teachers find themselves recreating or searching for les- sons or activities that are already available. They find themselves spending their time and money to create individualized lessons for their students. This is not an effective use of their time, and this is why Boom Learning created Boom Passport. Boom Pass- port includes; • 80,000+ lessons and resources for self-contained through re- source level students • Pre-K – Transition extension activities that are age and grade-level specific • Ability to differentiate lessons to meet students at their cog- nitive level • Age respectful – age-appropriate graphics or reading levels for secondary students • Ability to assign lessons to individual, small group or classes with data collection • Ability to export data for IEP goals • Device agnostic – use Boom Passport with ANY web-based device • Print based lessons – ALL lessons can be printed off for in- struction • Classroom based licensing for $299 per teacher
Image 1: Boom Passport offers over 80,000 lessons/activities
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October / November, 2025 | www.closingthegap.com/membership Closing The Gap © 2025 Closing The Gap, Inc. All rights reserved.
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