Aspire Living & Learning buys SD Associates to expand Vermont special-education services
What's the deal? Aspire Living & LearningDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, a nonprofit human services and education provider, has acquired SD Associates, a Vermont provider of early childhood, school-based, vocational, and therapeutic school services. Financial terms were not disclosed. The deal brings SD Associates' leadership and staff into Aspire.
What changes? Four SD Associates programs join Aspire: Sparklers early childhood ABA services in northern Vermont, school-based services in Northern and Central Vermont, Alpine vocational and life-skills programming for teens and adults, and a year-round therapeutic school in southern Vermont. The programs and teams remain in place. Aspire says it will add clinical expertise, workforce support, and quality and safety resources.
What's the endgame? Aspire frames the acquisition as a way to protect existing services while building scale. "We want to protect what makes these services successful while giving the teams behind them more resources," said Erica Hare, Aspire's chief executive officer. Over time, the organization sees room to increase capacity and reach more people across the state.
Why now? Vermont's special-education demand is rising even as enrollment falls. From the 2018-19 to 2023-24 school years, overall student enrollment declined 6.4% while the share of students with Individualized Education Programs rose 7.5%, per the Vermont Agency of Education.
Nearly one in five Vermont students had an IEP in 2023-24, ranking the state seventh nationally. Aspire, founded in Vermont more than 45 years ago, says the deal deepens its roots in the state where its work began.
The signal: The acquisition fits a broader pattern of nonprofit consolidation in disability and behavioral-health services, where providers cite scale as a way to manage Medicaid reimbursement pressure. Recent comparable deals include Merakey's combination with I Am Boundless. But this is a local service-provider expansion rather than a sign of a sector-wide boom — behavioral-health deal volume fell in the first half of 2026, with autism and I/DD transactions down year over year.
Read more: vermontbiz.com
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