PRESS RELEASE:

Campaign for Vermont Publishes Report on Savings Provided by Shared Education Services

Non-profit seeking to grow VT’s middle class finds education savings while expanding services for students.

MONTPELIER, VERMONT - This week, Campaign for Vermont Prosperity (CFV) published a report titled "Finding Savings Through Shared Services in Vermont Schools." The report focuses on leveraging Education Service Agencies (ESAs) to improve the efficiency of services being provided to students. A policy recommendation the organization put out in March recommended moving to this model, but the latest report put a number on the cost-savings potential. The Act 73 Task Force voted on Monday to advance a similar ESA model as their recommendation to the Legislature.

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,

Dear Members of the Act 73 Task Force,

You have no easy task before you to reconcile all the different perspectives you bring to the table and produce a pathway forward for education reform in Vermont. We were part of the conversations that led to Act 46 and that effort may have just been a foreshadow of this one.

Since 2010, Vermont has consolidated 271 school districts down to 119. During that same timeframe, we have seen spending accelerate and outcomes fall. Today, we are spending 79% above the national average but performing below average when you account for Vermont’s demographics.

Vermont’s education system has long grappled with balancing efficiency, equity, and local control. A recent Yale thesis by Grace Miller, titled Evaluating the Impact of School District Mergers in Vermont: Fiscal Reallocation, Equity, and Community Perspectives, provides a comprehensive analysis of the state’s school district merger initiatives from 2010 to 2020. The study examines the fiscal and operational impacts of these mergers, prompted by Vermont’s Act 153 and Act 46, and offers insights into their implications for educational equity, community dynamics, and future consolidation efforts.

Thank you for taking on such an entrenched issue this legislative session. The bill you are working on essentially equates to Act 60, Act 68, and Act 46 all wrapped into one and the fact that you have gotten this far in one year is already impressive.

There is no doubt more work to do to get this bill to the finish line, and tweaks will need to be made next year and in following years. I do not think it is an understatement to say that Vermonters are relying on you. They are relying on you to arrest skyrocketing education costs. They are relying on you to bring stability to a chaotic tax structure. They are relying on you to reverse the declining student outcomes that are jeopardizing the futures of so many young Vermonters.

The bill proposes comprehensive reforms to Vermont’s public education system, focusing on governance, funding, and quality to ensure equitable, sustainable, and efficient education for all students. The bill redirects commissions, establishes task forces, and imagines new systems to achieve these goals, with specific timelines for implementation.

The Legislature's grand education transformation initiative offers a mixed bag of results but does manage to move forward historic changes to the way we raise funds to pay for schools that should introduce better transparency and accountability for taxpayers while also putting downward pressure on spending. Unfortunately the combined effect of governance and finance changes that create a very top-down educational model. 

Good Morning House Ways & Means Committee,

Thank you for your work on the new foundation formula, this will be an important step forward for education policy in Vermont by reducing the complexity of the current system and providing transparency and predictability to voters about how the school budgets they vote on will impact their tax bills.

A counterproposal for 2025 education reform focused on the learnings from Act 46 and recognizing Vermonter’s preference towards local control of schools.

Executive Summary

It is now quite clear to most close observers that Vermont’s education system is unsustainable. School spending has increased 42% since 2014 while our student population has shrunk. This has pushed the state to the second highest cost per student in the country. At the same time student performance has declined.

Governor Scott and Secretary Saunders have proposed a bold plan to change the trajectory of our education system and re-imagine what education in Vermont will look like in the years to come. We appreciate the audacity of the plan they put forward. There are some things that make a lot of sense like the new foundation formula and the increased focus on oversight and accountability. There are also things that miss the mark, like unwieldly regional school districts.

After more than a decade working on education reform in Vermont, we know what is likely to work and what is not. We pointed out many of the pitfalls of Act 46 before the bill even passed the legislature. The current plan repeats some of these mistakes.

Our largest concern with the five-district model is that it eviscerates local control. Vermont’s schools are more than just buildings where we educate students, they serve as de-facto community centers. This is not unique to Vermont, I just read a report last week from MassInc talking about the importance of school-centered neighborhood vitality. If we move the responsibility for a school many miles away, we risk losing the connection to their community.

The tragedy is that we don’t have to. School districts, at their core, really only require a volunteer school board to operate. There are no meaningful cost savings to be had there. The major opportunity is our 52 supervisory unions. Currently they are the impediment to larger economies of scale as most of our overhead has already been moved up to that level. We get into details with our proposal below, but consolidating these structures makes much more sense than taking away local school boards and severing the connection between schools and their communities.

I hope to work with legislators and the administration to Vermont-size our education delivery system and to re-align our current incentive structure to achieve better outcomes for students, more engagement from communities, and stable and predictable costs for taxpayers.

On behalf of Vermonters,

The annual "yield" bill sets the statewide property tax rates for the following year (in this case FY2026).