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…