School Districts Are Forging New Partnerships as Redistricting Task Force Ponders Consolidation

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One of the first requirements of Vermont’s sweeping new education law, Act 73, is for lawmakers and leaders in the field to produce three maps of new, larger school districts. The idea is that 10 to 20 regional entities would provide students with more educational opportunities and be more efficient and cheaper to run than the 119 districts and supervisory unions currently operating.

Yet when the School District Redistricting Task Force met last week for the second of eight meetings, its 11 members seemed far from ready to assume the role of cartographers. They’d yet to receive reams of relevant data from the Agency of Education and other state agencies and grappled with fundamental questions: How would they obtain community input? Would the maps be recommendations or just instructional tools? Would consolidating districts actually meet the law’s main goals of cutting costs and improving the quality of education for students?

“Redistricting is not a panacea. It’s not going to suddenly solve all the problems and could make things worse … And we are tasked with this job,” said Sen. Martine Gulick (D-Chittenden-Central), a cochair. She voted against the ed reform bill when it was approved in June. “What is that thing that we are going to produce that … will do no harm but also might fix some of the problems that we’ve been discussing?”

Some school districts aren’t waiting for the state to figure it out. Taking advantage of previously passed legislation, they’ve joined forces with neighboring districts in the hopes that regionalization can accomplish, at least in part, Act 73’s aims: cut costs and increase educational opportunities for their students. These partnerships — forged by the districts themselves instead of lawmakers — could influence the decisions that the task force makes as it scrambles to meet a December 1 deadline for recommending new district lines.

Members of the task force say they’re open to hearing from school leaders about what works best for them. But the redistricting process described in Act 73 features multiple steps and many layers of review, meaning any final decisions on the state level could face challenges and are years away.

“The position I’m taking at this point is, We have to move forward,” said Sherry Sousa, superintendent of Mountain Views Supervisory Union. “If I wait until there’s an approved redistricting plan, then I have unserved students.”

Her district is already well ahead of the curve. Five years ago, Mountain Views, which serves around 1,000 students in the towns of Woodstock, Barnard, Bridgewater, Killington, Plymouth, Pomfret and Reading, began working with seven neighboring supervisory unions and school districts to pool resources for special education, professional development, staffing and hiring. They formalized the relationship two years ago by creating a nonprofit umbrella organization called the Vermont Learning Collaborative and hired an executive director to manage it.

Then, last year, the districts, enabled by a state law passed in 2024, started the process of forming a Board of Cooperative Educational Services, or BOCES. More commonly known as Educational Service Agencies and used in 43 states, these entities help districts collaborate on providing services such as special education in order to increase efficiency and provide better services to students.

Earlier this month, Mountain Views’ school board ratified the articles of agreement for the Southeast Vermont Region BOCES, making it the cooperative’s founding member. The seven other members, in Rutland, Windham and Windsor counties, are expected to sign off in the coming weeks. After that, the Agency of Education must officially approve the BOCES, which it has indicated it will do. The formal approval comes with a $10,000 startup grant from the state.

As a condition of membership, each district will also contribute toward its administrative costs, which will be set each year as part of school budgets. Programming and services are not included in those fees.

The partnership is already paying dividends, Sousa said. By pooling money, the eight Southeast superintendents have been able to provide high-quality professional development for teachers and administrators, saving districts an average of 66 percent on those costs. They’ve also provided comprehensive joint trainings on hazing, harassment, bullying and special-education law, which the Agency of Education no longer provides.

The executive director of the Vermont Learning Collaborative, Jill Graham, will lead the BOCES once it is formally approved. She’s helped the districts recruit for hard-to-fill special-education roles such as speech-language pathologists, occupational therapists and board-certified behavior analysts. Graham also helped Windham Southeast create a regional program for elementary school students with social-emotional challenges, which will open this fall and cost less than sending students to out-of-district therapeutic schools.

The Learning Collaborative has been limited in what it can provide because of its designation as a private nonprofit, Graham said. But as a BOCES, it will be a public agency that can oversee state and federal grants, which will enable it to offer more services to districts.

“Declining enrollment is happening all over the country and hurting school budgets and making schools more creative in how they can work together,” said Joan Wade, executive director of the Association of Educational Service Agencies, a national professional organization. “BOCES [can] be a strength for them. You can still have that local school and community but share services with other school districts in the region and have a stronger system.”

Across the country, these regional partnerships are finding ways to save money. Some have formed cooperative purchasing agreements to lower the cost of supplies and big-ticket items such as roofs and sports fields, Wade said. They’ve also shared payroll clerks, technology support staff and transportation services.

“The possibilities are endless,” Wade said.

It’s not yet clear how the formation of BOCES arrangements will affect the ongoing mapping process.

But other school boards across Vermont — all members of a new grassroots advocacy group, the Rural School Community Alliance — have started voting in recent weeks on resolutions that lay out their commitment to collaboration. Many want to stay within a supervisory union, which contains multiple school districts, each with its own school board. That would allow them to maintain some modicum of local control rather than being combined into a larger school district; they’d rather form voluntary partnerships than face a state mandate. Under Act 73, at least one of the proposed redistricting maps must include supervisory unions, composed of two or more school districts that each have their own school board.

The White River Valley Supervisory Union school board passed a resolution this month that it would “reach out to contiguous school districts and supervisory unions to explore combining into a larger supervisory union” in an effort to “optimize cost savings and efficiencies where possible while maintaining local democratic engagement, community voice, oversight and accountability.”

The Greater Rutland County Supervisory Union and the Cabot, Twinfield and Craftsbury school boards, among others, have issued similar statements indicating a commitment to exploring voluntary mergers with other districts while still staying part of a supervisory union. The resolutions have all been submitted as public comment to the redistricting task force.

The statements have not gone unnoticed. At their August 19 meeting, members spent considerable time debating whether to rely more heavily on data from the state or the districts’ preferences — essentially, the difference between top-down and bottom-up reform.

“If you force a merger and someone doesn’t want it, you’re not making kids’ lives better,” said Rep. Rebecca Holcombe (D-Norwich), one of the six legislators on the task force and Vermont’s education secretary from 2014 to 2018. Later in the meeting, though, she pointed out that Act 73, which she voted against, was designed as a top-down bill and did not call for a collaborative approach to reform.

Sousa, of Mountain Views, said if the redistricting task force is focused on what’s best for students — “not for adults, and not to perpetuate certain political agendas” — its members should pay attention to what her collaborative district is doing. She noted that Mountain Views’ test scores are among the highest in Vermont, while the percentage of students who qualify for special education is much lower than the state average.

“That we can bring together the individual perspectives of our schools and our communities to work together — to have cost-saving and higher-quality programs — I think that’s really important for the redistricting group to look at,” Sousa said.

At last week’s meeting, Rep. Edye Graning (D-Jericho), the task force’s cochair, indicated that its members were all ears.

“If there are regions of the state that are already working together on some kind of partnership … we don’t want to work against that,” Graning said. “Let us know.”

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