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.

At the end of last session a number of legislators announced they were not going to run for reelection and over a dozen more lost their reelection bids. In total, this meant 54 new faces in Montpelier this year, which created a serious stir. The political void departing legislators would be leaving behind – in terms of expertise, knowledge of the process, the history behind key bills, familiarity with staff – is hard to overstate.

The legislature has gone home after passing a historic education reform bill. At the end of the day, most of the drama played out in conference committee, but the floor debates still featured impassioned pleas from supporters and opponents alike. Despite attempts by progressive legislators in both chambers to reject the conference committee compromise, the education reform bill passed handedly in the House and eked out passage in the Senate.

It is clear that the House does not want voters involved in setting school budgets. It has always been sort of implicit in this bill, but House members said it explicitly in debates this week: they do not envision a future system where local voters weigh in on their school budgets in any meaningful way.

This week's legislative update isn't much of an actual update. That's because the conference committee charged with finding a path forward on education reform (H.454) did not meet at all this week. And, yes, the Legislature went home in order give this same committee time to work out a compromise...

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 Legislature worked late last night, finally concluding that an education reform deal was out of reach. They are coming back in a couple weeks to (hopefully) finish the job.

The most significant event in Montpelier this week is the one that almost didn't happen... Sensing that the education reform bill (H.454) was going to have some challenges on the Senate floor, we issued an action alert on Monday. Those concerns turned out to be well-founded when Senate leadership announced on Tuesday that they were pulling the bill back from the floor.

We have a bunch of new bill reviews for you this week, including BOTH the House and Senate's versions of the housing bills and healthcare payment reform.