As Vermont reshapes its education system, the Neshobe Current is looking at what the changes could mean for Otter Valley schools and communities. This is the second article in the series, following an overview of Vermont’s educational reforms available here.

Seven school systems across southwestern Vermont, including the one covering Brandon and Pittsford, are coming together in a new state-required effort to consider how they might share staff, programs, and services.

As one part of Vermont’s broader education reforms, Act 170 requires each of Vermont’s supervisory unions to participate in one of seven new Collaborative Education Service Areas, or CESAs, shown on this statewide map.

RNESU, which includes the Otter Valley Unified Union (OVUU) School District, is assigned to the Southwest CESA. The Southwest CESA also includes the Bennington-Rutland, Greater Rutland County, Mill River, Rutland City, Slate Valley, and Southwest Vermont school systems.

Being part of the Southwest CESA does not mean OVUU is merging with the other districts in the region. Possible changes to school district governance are being considered through a separate Act 170 process.

What is a CESA?

CESAs are regional organizations designed to help school systems provide some services and resources jointly rather than separately. They could, for example, share specialized staff, programs, facilities, and expertise or make purchases collectively, potentially giving members greater buying power.

Similar regional service organizations have long operated in other states. New York’s 37 Boards of Cooperative Educational Services, for example, provide shared educational programs and services to nearly all of the state’s school districts.

Beginning July 1, 2027, CESAs must be prepared to provide services ranging from special education, business administration, and information technology to professional development, curriculum coordination, transportation, and facilities planning, when requested by members and approved by the CESA board.

What Vermont’s CESAs will look like in practice remains unclear. The Southwest CESA has not yet determined which specific services it will offer, so RNESU does not yet know what services, if any, it might access through the CESA.

Building a CESA from Scratch

RNESU Superintendent Rene Sanchez sees potential benefit in the new organization but also has reservations about the new administrative layer created by the state requirement.

“I do worry that it’s another level of bureaucracy,” he said.

At the Southwest CESA’s first meeting Aug. 6, Sanchez, RNESU’s representative, was elected chair as members began building the organization largely from the ground up. They will develop bylaws, take inventory of their existing resources and areas of need, and work through questions about finances, insurance, and staffing.

State guidance on many of those details has yet to be developed or communicated, leaving members uncertain where to turn for answers.

“As I’m listening to all of this, I’m hearing more questions than answers,” Mill River Superintendent Cheryl Gonzalez said. “And questions that we don’t even know who to ask, or who would have the answer.”

Potential benefits for OVUU

The Legislature created CESAs in hopes that sharing services regionally could improve quality while reducing costs. Sen. Ruth Hardy, D-Addison, described the goal as creating “economies of scale, lower costs, and more uniform quality for these shared services.”

“I’m definitely hopeful that we will be able to share services that we have a hard time staffing or paying for individually, because we either go without or we pay an exorbitant cost for them,” Sanchez said.

Special education and technology are two areas where Sanchez thinks RNESU might particularly benefit from shared resources. He noted, however, that RNESU is currently in relatively good shape overall, while some smaller school systems may have greater needs.

At a recent OVUU School Board meeting, Sanchez offered examples of what shared services might look like in practice. RNESU currently contracts for occupational and physical therapy because it does not have those positions on staff. He pointed to those services as examples of needs that could potentially be met through a CESA, along with support for responsibilities such as Title IX investigations, grant writing, and monitoring safety and security around the district.

Beyond shared staffing and administrative services, the law also calls for improving access to career and technical education (CTE). Otter Valley students already have access to regional technical centers, including Stafford Technical Center in Rutland and the Hannaford Career Center in Middlebury, but the CESA could potentially help school systems coordinate CTE opportunities across the region, making it easier for students to access a broader range of programs.

“I think that it is going to be an amazing opportunity for us to really get together and understand what resources our seven entities have that we’ll be able to share,” Sanchez said at the Aug. 6 meeting. With that information, he said, “we can best decide how the CESA can serve our schools, our taxpayers, and our students.”

Will it save money?

Whether those potential benefits will translate into savings is less certain.

Each CESA can receive $15,000 in startup funding and $50,000 toward hiring an executive director. At the first meeting, Southwest CESA members noted that the funding would cover only a portion of the work ahead and said they expect member supervisory unions will ultimately have to cover the CESA’s operating costs. That could mean additional costs before savings are realized.

At the same time, it is unclear how much some of the anticipated efficiencies will actually save. At the Aug. 25 OVUU School Board meeting, RNESU Director of Business and Finance Brenda Fleming questioned whether buying collectively through the CESA would necessarily produce the savings some anticipate, noting, for example, that Vermont schools already have access to statewide purchasing arrangements.

Another uncertainty is how the CESA will fit with the separate school district merger process now getting underway. The CESA is being built around Vermont’s current school governance structure even as that structure could change, making it difficult to know what services will ultimately be needed or how they might best be shared.

“Building a CESA on what we have — an inherently inefficient system — is likely not going to save us any money,” Bennington-Rutland Supervisory Union Superintendent Randi Lowe said. But building one around what Vermont’s education system eventually becomes could be “programmatically, educationally really good for kids and financially really good for our communities.”

OVUU Board Chair Laurie Bertrand noted that RNESU already has a long history of sharing services.

“From the time of Superintendent Mathis, we have done everything we can to consolidate, so there may not be a lot more cost savings we can accomplish,” she said.

For Bertrand, the measure of whether greater regional cooperation is worthwhile is relatively simple:

“If there’s a way to provide more opportunities to students at a lower cost or at the same cost,” she said, “that’s a win for everybody.”