Vermont’s educational governance is distinguished by its small scale: as of 2025, there are 52 Supervisory Unions (SUs) overseeing 119 school districts, with an average size of just under 700 students. Under Act 73, the state contemplates requiring SUs (or merged school districts) to have approximately between 4,000 and 8,000 students. This effectively will compress the number of governance units to between 10 and 20.

Across the country, states use Education Service Agencies (ESAs), which are sometimes termed Intermediate Units, Educational Service Centers, Educational Service Units, or Boards of Cooperative Education Services (BOCES) depending on the state, as regional delivery vehicles so that small and mid-sized districts can access programs and operations they couldn’t afford alone. ESAs commonly run career & technical education centers, regional special-education programs and day-treatment sites, cooperative purchasing and transportation hubs, IT and data services, and large-scale professional development—all activities that gain from scale and centralized expertise.

By pooling demand and centralizing expensive, low-frequency services, ESAs lower per-student costs for participating districts and expand program offerings without every district building its own duplicative capacity. Research and practitioner summaries emphasize that the most effective ESAs deliver services more efficiently than single districts and enable access to programs otherwise unavailable locally; New York’s BOCES and Pennsylvania’s Intermediate Units are longstanding examples that leverage state aid, cooperative contracting, and shared facilities to do this at scale.

In Vermont, we call our ESAs Supervisory Unions. But we don’t leverage them for their potential efficiencies of scale and expanded service outputs the same way that other states do. As noted above, there are only about two school districts for every SU, this is not an efficient or effective shared service model.

One driver of the Act 73 reform is the belief that Vermont’s governance units are too small to capture meaningful administrative economies of scale. Too often this conversation focuses on school districts instead of SU’s, where other states have found meaningful cost-savings through shared services.

On behalf of Vermonters,