Campaign for Vermont urges regional ESAs tied to CTE, says supervisory-union redesign could yield hundreds of millions in savings

Ben Kinsley, executive director of Campaign for Vermont, told the House Education committee on Feb. 20, 2026, that the state could reorganize supervisory unions into regional education service agencies (ESAs) aligned with career and technical education centers and realize large fiscal savings while expanding program access.

Kinsley said Campaign for Vermont re-ran regression analyses first done in 2014 and updated in 2024 and found no statistical relationship at the school-district level between district size and total spending per student. "Scale does not actually mean lower cost on a per student basis," he said. He added that when the analysis is done at the supervisory-union (SU) level rather than the district level, size explains about 16% of variation in spending between SUs.

The presentation argued that a reimagined SU model—structured and scaled more like ESAs used in other states—could centralize business and financial services (payroll, benefits administration), special education coordination, and CTE programming, generating efficiencies without mandating district consolidation. Kinsley described ESAs as cooperative, mandatory co-ops made up of member districts under a single umbrella and suggested starting from existing technical-center/CTE regions.

Kinsley presented two cost estimates, both stated in FY22 dollars: one based on a category-by-category consolidation analysis that estimated $133,000,000 in savings from SU consolidation plus $200,000,000 from shifting additional district services to ESAs, for a total of $333,000,000; and a second estimate using assumptions from a Yale analysis of Act 46 that yielded $291,000,000. He said those totals are roughly equivalent to 12–14% of current education spending and illustrated a thought exercise in which half of the savings ($150,000,000) would reduce homestead property taxes and half would reduce non-homestead property taxes.

Kinsley cited the Miller (Yale) review of Act 46 consolidations and told the committee that the study showed little district-level cost savings and that some spending categories shifted upward after consolidation, including salaries and transportation. "We saw an increase of almost $1,500 a student, when you in salaries and benefits, and also transportation costs," he said, describing that dynamic as a principal challenge for forced district consolidation.

Committee members repeatedly raised concerns about the proposal’s operational and governance implications. A committee member worried about collective-bargaining constraints and said the public-sector labor context makes private-sector consolidation analogies difficult. Another committee member expressed alarm that larger governance units could politicize schools and weaken instructional leadership, arguing principals might become subject to the whims of elected volunteer boards rather than focused instructional leaders: "Huge alarm bells and concerns here ... that just terrifies me," the member said.

Kinsley acknowledged those trade-offs and suggested several hybrid approaches—retaining some SU executive functions while shifting services upward to ESAs, or incentivizing voluntary local consolidations where appropriate—while emphasizing the need for clearer statewide accountability measures to preserve instructional quality.

The committee did not vote on any proposal. Members asked for additional technical detail and indicated interest in follow-up testimony, particularly about governance arrangements, how ESA budgets would be allocated back to districts, and how the model would interact with collective-bargaining agreements. Kinsley paused further slides because of time and offered to return for additional discussion.

The presentation and subsequent Q&A framed the choice as policy trade-offs: potential systemwide savings and broader CTE access on the one hand, and governance, labor, and instructional-leadership risks on the other. The committee requested more information before pursuing legislation or formal policy changes.