Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Speaker 0]: Welcome back to House Education, 02/20/2026. Next up on our agenda, we're gonna hear a presentation from the Campaign for Vermont and sort of their thoughts, which I think have been sort of ever evolving as we have ever evolved through Act 73 last year and this year. They wanted to come in and sort of give us their take on things and some of their research to help us in our work.

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: Floor is all yours. Great introduction. Thank you.

[Speaker 0]: I will say, if you could just we'll probably need a high level, like, what is the Campaign for Vermont?

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: Of course. Thanks. Yeah. My name is Ben Kinzley. I'm the executive director of Campaign for Vermont. We are a statewide network of over 20,000 people that are focused on creating a growing middle class here in the state. And we do that through a variety of ways, both public policy research and advocacy work on topics ranging from tax policy to economic development to what we're talking about today, which is education policy. And this is sort of the intersection of two major themes, right? The property tax burden that we hear a lot about, as well as the future educational opportunities for our kids who are ultimately gonna progress into the workforce and become a value add there, both for themselves and for the broader economy. So education, understandably, is something we've spent a long time and a lot of time looking at. In fact, we first started working on this. Tom Pelham and I first started working on this back in 2013 and have been kind of involved since then to varying degrees. And our thought process, much like the thought process in this building, has evolved to some degree as well over that timeframe. So I wanted to share some of our latest thought processes with you guys. And interestingly, I think the timing is pretty good given some of the conversations you've had this week and the things that you're trying to figure out in terms of districts versus CSOs versus supervisory unions and all of those different pieces and how they fit together in the future state of our education system. So I'd say the first thing that is useful, we did a regression analysis on Vermont's education data back in 2014, in the lead up to act 46. And one of the things we looked at, for those that are not data nerds like I am, regression analysis is where you take two different statistics and you understand how they interrelate with each other. So does one when you change one, is there a similar change in that other variable? And so we applied that to district size, so school district size, and then looked at spending per student basis, spend as well as spending on a weighted student basis. We looked at that in 2014, as well as what other factors could possibly influence student outcomes. Is there a relationship between scale and student outcomes? Is there something else that's driving student outcomes or costs? So we looked at a bunch of different variables. The slide behind me is the one I think that is most relevant to the conversations we're having today in the context of Act 73. And this on a school district basis, the cost per student relative to the size of the school district. And the major finding here was that, as you can sort of see from this scatter plot, there is no relationship, no statistical relationship between the size of the district and the cost per student. That is a total spending cost per student as visualized on this chart. But there was also not a significant difference when we looked at it on a weighted student basis. So that's sort of an important note inside our current system. Scale does not actually mean lower cost on a per student basis. The interesting thing,

[Speaker 0]: we're pushing on

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: the district level. Yes.

[Beth Quimby (Member)]: A follow-up question. You said on a weighted student basis. And so that's using our current weights, the current weights in terms of like the way Act 127 was implemented, sparse. I think we're currently waiting tuition. We're currently waiting non operating. I just worry sometimes about how that skews. Correct. Yeah.

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: So we looked at it in both. So we did the initial analysis in 2014. We redid it in 2024. Act 46, which is the chart you're seeing behind me is the one from 2024. That relationship did not change in either way we did it. And we looked at it both on a total cost per ATM, which is a chart behind me, which was a weighted per equalized pupil in 2014. It was weighted per equalized pupil in 2024. It was the new formula. So we looked at it both ways and there wasn't a significant difference. Either way we looked at it, the chart pretty much looks the same. So that did change, however, and this is our president, Pat McDonnell,

[Beth Quimby (Member)]: as we're No, boy. Probably

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: He's now just

[Beth Quimby (Member)]: roaming around on the 3rd Floor. You Transportation bailed me out.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: If you are gonna be joining

[Speaker 0]: a testimony, pull a seat right front of you.

[Beth Quimby (Member)]: I'll make faces or whatever.

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: That is the former, among many other titles.

[Beth Quimby (Member)]: Sevens.

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: Seven titles. The former deputy secretary of education, a number of other things. So when we looked at this, and this is different, we did not look at this in 2014. We did look at it in 2024. We asked the question, is there does the relationship change between cost per student basis and scale if we look at the SU level instead of the district level? And it turns out there is a relationship at the at the SU level between scale and efficiency, if you wanna call it that, on a cost per student basis. In fact, 16% of the variation in spending from SU to SU could be explained by its size. So 16% of that variation could be explained by its size.

[Speaker 0]: You're using cost and spending interchangeably here?

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: Yes. I'm using cost and spending interchangeably here. This is technically looking if you wanna this would be looking at a cost basis, technically. But our spending spending and costs often, but not always, are the same same thing. You know, you can kinda conceptualize them differently. But but, yes, I'm using them interchangeably. I just spending is a function of what the voters are willing to approve. Cost is a function of what a education system offers the price tag that goes along with it, which then, of course, must be approved by the voters as well. If you're getting to a zero at bottom line, at the end of the day, they kinda gotta have to be the same thing. Of course, same thing at a statewide level in

[Speaker 0]: this context. Yeah. I just my my caution is that spending is choice. And so when we say that something costs less, I think we also just jumped in that that was a that they're choosing to spend less and perhaps offer less. Right.

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: So there's a there's a there's a difference in connotation between the two terms. So that this finding that there is a relationship, a statistical relationship between SU size and efficiency in terms of a cost or a spending per student basis. We started looking at supervisory union structure in Vermont. Some of this information is very familiar to you. Some other components here might not be. One of the interesting things we looked at was scale, right? In terms of what our SUs are offering today. Right now, have almost a two to one relationship between supervisory unions and school districts. When we look at similar structures in other states, we see that there's a much, that relationship is quite a bit different. And we also looked at number of students on an SU basis, as well as the geographic footprint of SUs. And again, those are also kind of pretty out of line with what we see in other states for similar structures. And you might be asking yourself, what similar structures are we comparing to? The National Center for Education Statistics classifies Vermont's supervisory unions as education service agencies or ESAs. And we are familiar with what ESAs are in other states. BOCES is not an unfamiliar term in this building. Other states call them different things, regional school units in Maine, intermediary units in Pennsylvania, and almost everywhere else, they called on some variation of ESA, regional ESA, comprehensive cooperative ESA, CISA, if you will, the idea that the task force came up with, all based on the same sort of model. And so our kind of insight here is we have a structure today that is viewed nationally as an ESA, but we don't necessarily view it that way. And there's a couple of key reasons for that. The number one being governance. We tend to look at SUs as a governance unit because the superintendent is attached to it. And the other thing that's really different between Vermont's supervisory unions and ESAs we see in other states are the scope of services. Really, there's only two services that are consistently provided by SUs in Vermont, and that is special education and chief executive functionality through the superintendent. And that second one that we sort of attach to when we think about it as a governance unit. That is a little bit unique to Vermont's supervisory. It's like there's usually not that chief executive function attached in most other ESAs. But the other thing that's really different is the scope of services. Most ESAs provide, in other states, provide a huge range of services, and we'll get into that in a minute here, but not the two that we consistently provide here in Vermont. Just to be clear, an SU provides also a broad range of services in most cases. In some cases, yes. It depends. It varies from SU to SU, what they provide. Statutorily, it's the superintendent and special education. I mean, curriculum coordination. Curriculum coordination, maybe statutory requirement as well. But there's a lot of other services that are already being utilized at the SU level for sure. And it just varies from SU to SU today. And the other one that's really notable difference is scale. I mentioned earlier, we basically have as exists today, two districts for every little bit more, it's like 2.3 districts for every one SU on average. And we see a much larger number of districts nationally that are members or under the umbrella of an ESA. So there's a difference in scale there, both from the number of districts perspective, but also the number of students and the geographic footprint. So all three of those components are quite a bit different than what we see when we look at ESAs and other states. But here's a range of services that an ESA could provide. I think I'm not gonna go through this list, and this list is not exhaustive. There's a whole bunch of other services that could be provided here. The one that I do want to call out, because I've experienced this in the corporate for profit world, is the business and financial services. Whenever you have a merger or an acquisition in the private sector, and I've been through two of these, are the first thing I looked at is business and financial services. And it's because that's the one place where you can immediately get scale and you're not duplicating infrastructure. It's things like payroll, benefit administration, all those types of things that right now in the state, we could have potentially 170 different business entities that are doing all of those functions separately. So that's something that when you look at the private sector, when they do a merger and acquisition, they're not necessarily going out in and immediately pulling out things like professional development and whatnot. The first thing they go after is business and financial services because it's the one place you can get scale immediately without impacting other operations within the various businesses and then other things you do over time. So there's some potential learnings there in terms of how you go after this and where

[Beth Quimby (Member)]: the savings might be. I appreciate the comparison there. And I wonder how in in SU, in schools, much of their business obviously is HR, and it's teachers with collective bargaining agreements. And so the more complex an SU is, or the more districts that sit under it, the inability to roll the way that in the private sector, you might be able to roll those into a common. I wonder how those differences might I don't know if this is a question or just a sort of random thought bubble, but it strikes me as one of the challenges of the current structure of SUs and the sort of complexity of them or the scale of them is that also the major payroll thing they're dealing with is significantly different than that it's collective bargaining agreements. And so you've got some limitations around that.

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: Yeah, you deal with different pay scales.

[Beth Quimby (Member)]: Yeah, yeah.

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: There's accounting software that do that type of thing. I think that is an interesting point that you bring up, though, because we're sort of programmed, I think, as twenty first century Americans to think bigger is better from a scale standpoint. And that's generally true in the private sector. It gets a lot more complicated in the public sector, partially because of the collective bargaining agreements. And we'll get more into that later. But the collective bargaining agreements definitely make it more complicated in public sector. So you can sort of see the path we're going down with ESAs. I think one of the important things I kind of want to pause before we dive into exactly what our proposal is and what we believe the cost savings are attached to it. I want to talk a little bit about why we are not pursuing district consolidation at this point. And there's a couple of reasons why. One is the risk of breaking community ties and engagement. And there's some emerging research now that's showing that there's really reciprocating benefits between, for a strong community ties between school and their communities. Schools thrive and do better when they have a strong community connection, as well as those communities actually see more economic investment and development because they have a strong community tie with their school. I can send you all a report that Mass Inc. Did on this, but it was a really interesting perspective to see some of that emerging research. And we also saw some of this during ACT 46, of course, like people are very reluctant to give up their community schools. Of course, we already talked about the regression analysis not showing that large districts perform better. So for a dollar for dollar effort, just moving to larger districts alone does not guarantee cost savings. And the national literature also indicates that to some degree. And this is basically the same conclusion the Act seventy three Task Force came to is that scale only helps you to a certain degree. And then at another point, it starts actually increasing costs. We've got some summary of the national research on that. The other important one that's interesting, and if you haven't looked at this report, Grace Miller, who was a researcher at Yale, did a report on Act 46 consolidations in Vermont, looking at the year prior to merger and the year post merger. Agency of Education was supposed to do an analysis like this and it never happened. So this is what we have to work with. But it was very informative in the fact that there were basically no demonstrated cost savings at a tie level between the consolidations the year prior and the year after. What it did show is that some of the spending categories shifted. So there was increased costs in some areas and lower costs in other areas like administration and purchase services. But there was an increase of almost $1,500 a student in salaries and benefits and also transportation costs. Interestingly enough, when there's a group of Chittenden County school districts that looked at what their increased costs would be if they had to level up salaries as if they went to a Chittenden County wide school districts or even larger as the governor was proposing. They came up with a number that was very similar to that. So that salary level up component of like, you get five school districts and there's this urge to not tell anyone or not cut anyone salaries or benefits. And so you have to level everyone up to the most generous collective bargaining contract of that five, that group of districts that you're merging. And that was a dynamic that Act 46 really stumbled over. And the Miller report really points to that in a lot of ways. So if you're looking at a district consolidation plan, you got to figure out how to overcome that diseconomy of scale that comes with having to buy out those teacher contracts or level them up. And so that's why, again, looking at district level, there's just not a ton of cost savings there unless you want to be really draconian in terms of how you allow those collective bargaining agreements to be renegotiated or mandate that, okay, you can increase your level of your collective bargaining agreements, but then you have to scale down your number of staff and be prescriptive about that. Otherwise, you're really back at a zero sum game. And that's what the

[Chris Taylor (Vice Chair)]: Miller report found. Yeah.

[Beth Quimby (Member)]: Can I ask the last bullet on this one? When you say national research and the sort

[Chris Taylor (Vice Chair)]: of

[Beth Quimby (Member)]: mixed results on district, did your look at research we keep hearing, I think we just saw in Mark Baker's testimony that around 2,000 in terms of a district size is a bit of a tipping point. But beyond that, the savings are much more variable. But up to that, that is where some larger So in consolidating some of the smallest is where some of initial savings can come from. But obviously it's not district Yes.

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: Yeah. I mean, that's a great point. I've got some quotes from some of the research. We cited over a dozen different studies in the actual report that this is based on. We put out in November where we estimated the cost savings for an ESA structure. But this is kind of a summary of some of the key points. And really, to boil it down, the ideal range is somewhere between 303,000. So 2,000 being on the little bit higher end of the range, but that's certainly within the range of what the national research shows. Interestingly enough, the average Vermont school district size post ACT 46 is 600 students, which is twice the mint the floor. So again, all of this kind of led us back to maybe there's some savings that you could get in single digits and percentage wise from trying to get some of those districts that are on the very small end below that 300 threshold by getting them to merge. But the savings statewide is very minimal if you force that to happen. And some of that could happen and is happening voluntarily today anyway. And there's some ways that you all could continue to incentivize that and we can talk about it a little bit. But the other really important thing I wanna touch on here, because this is sort of like this whole conversation, sort of parallel to this whole conversation, but it's the foundation for it. And if we look at the chart behind me, this is education spending again on a cost per student basis going back all the way to 1970. And the kind of bright green line shows up that on the screen. Bright green line is Vermont. The blue line, light blue line is the New England average. And then the red line is The US as a whole. And what you can see is there's a couple inflection points here. The first one, if you look back to the eighties, Vermont was actually below the national average and quite a bit below the New England average. The decade that we passed

[Speaker 0]: I'd say we were also forty eighth to fiftieth paid for public school teachers at that

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: time too. Yes, we're a little bit better today. Yeah, we're a little bit better today. So if you look at the major inflection point there, where we had been, for most of the '90s, we'd been above the national average, but slightly below the New England average. The point at which we pass the New England average is in the decade from 2000 to 2010, which is the decade following the passage of Act 60. So you can see there's a dramatic acceleration in spending in that decade. And then if we look at, there's this vertical bar there, it shows like everything to the right of that is an annual basis because it's the data that was available to us. We had it in decades from 1970 to 2010 and then annually from 2010 to 2021. So the other acceleration you can see in this, the second acceleration you can see in this is in the twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen school year. So you start breaking away from the England average, accelerating at a faster pace. Interestingly enough, that is during the act 46 consolidations. That's 2016 to 2020 time frame. And then you can see the bump at the end from COVID that everyone kind of experienced across the board.

[Speaker 0]: I think- would say it's coincidentally also around the same time that our enrollment started dropping somewhat precipitously. Yeah, I mean- Which drives up per people spending. Which one? Well, you said coincidentally, the

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: time we hit Act 46, spending increased. Is on a per pupil basis because, so per pupil spending goes up as the number of pupils goes down as well. Correct, it's a function of that as well, to some degree. I think the thing that was worth pointing out here is all of New England experienced population, school population loss as a whole during that same timeframe, but to not see the type of per student cost increase that Vermont did. And that change might be slightly different in terms of Vermont maybe losing population faster than New England as a whole, but both New England and Vermont experienced similar demographic challenges. All right, so what is our proposal? Our proposal is to replace Vermont's current supervisory unions with ESAs that are at a larger scale and based around career and technical education centers. So I think you've heard some flavor of that type of proposal in the past, but there's a couple of reasons for this. One is just to try to get to a scale that is more in line with what other states see for their ESAs. And then also to vertically align our career and technical education programming and post secondary workforce pipeline programming in a vertical alignment with our pre K through 12 school system. Right now, it's sort of on the side. And then I know the agency has put out the concept of using an ESA, one statewide ESA to provide CTE. We feel like that just continues to further silo CTE from our pre K through 12 education system. So we prefer having CTE aligned with our pre K through 12 system underneath the umbrella of an ESA, a regional ESA. The second thing that we would do is push any remaining services up to that new ESA level, which would get efficiencies of scale that we're talking about with CISOs and that other states have seen. So it's not just going to fewer of these sort of units, It's also making sure that they're providing the full range of services to get cost savings out of the system.

[Speaker 0]: I get some terminology here to roll off the same wavelength. When we have been talking about ESAs in here, it's more of a service providing entity that is cooperatively formed, but does not have the sort of statutory powers and duties that are entrusted in a supervisory union. I think what you're probably proposing here is supervisory unions.

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: Or what's the different unions envisioned in a little bit of a different way? So I would describe it as a re envisioned supervisory union. And we can get into this. Do have some slides in here on governance and how that might work and how some of the how ESA or supervisory union or CISA or whatever term we want to use to describe these new entities. We've not married to one particular term. We've used ESA just because that's the generic term that is used nationally.

[Speaker 0]: Yes, but nationally, I think in many cases and probably most, the ESA is not a sort of government controlling entity of a school system. It is a sort of side service provider fee, often on a

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: fee for service basis. There's a couple of different models, how that can work. Fee for service is one of them. The intermediate units in Pennsylvania are a little bit different in terms of how they're structured. And they're a little bit more of the government. Arm of the government. Arm of the government. Same thing in Maine. The structure that they did in Maine is much more similar to what we have in terms of a government entity and not like a nonprofit that's a service provider. It's really all those sort of questions kind of come back to like governance. Is this nonprofit entity that is sitting on the side that is just providing services? Or is it a co op that is made up of its member school districts? And that's sort of the way that we're envisioning it. It's more of a co op that's made up of co op, mandatory co op made up of school districts.

[Beth Quimby (Member)]: So when it says a 100 plus school districts, so under your proposal, there is no district consolidation recommended. We're not, And there'll still be local districts sort of deciding that on their own, maybe underneath these.

[Chris Taylor (Vice Chair)]: I think- At

[Beth Quimby (Member)]: this point, none of the district consolidation is creating these new units.

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: Yeah, we're open to district consolidation where it makes sense. Task force kind of termed as strategic mergers. We do think that mostly those should be local decisions. They can be incentivized by the state, and there's a couple of ways we can do that. But I think, yes, because the data suggests there's really no cost savings there in the short term. And the long term cost savings really are probably coming from the foundation formula. So as long as a district can operate efficiently and provide and at a delivering a quality of service that we would expect within the context of the foundation formula, let them keep doing what they wanna do. And I would give an example of this. It's no longer a district, but it's a school, which is kind of a similar challenges when you talk about individual schools. But Ryan Harity is the superintendent in Memorial North. He has the one remaining one room schoolhouse in the state in his district, and it's several miles up the road from a relatively large high school and middle school. People ask him, Well, why wouldn't you just close that one room schoolhouse and send kids up the road to your much larger, presumably more efficient schools is like, well, one, those kids are doing great in that school. And that just so happens that one of my best teachers in the entire district is in that school in a multi grade classroom. And so they're doing great and they're doing great in an efficient way. It's cost effective and good outcomes. It's like, so what we're really looking for, I think, at the end of the day is we want kids to thrive and we want them to thrive at price point that taxpayers can afford. So if they can operate within those boundaries, then let them decide what's best for them.

[Beth Quimby (Member)]: Thank you.

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: So sort of our perspective. So yes, we're focused on the SU ESA level because that's where we believe the cost savings are.

[Beth Quimby (Member)]: Thank you.

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: One other thing I want to point

[Speaker 0]: out

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: here is there is an opportunity through ESAs. And I think this may have been discussed in this room a little bit, but to expand program offerings to students. So if you are shifting to this concept of a cooperative service provider, it doesn't have to be limited to payroll and special education or any of those sort of business services. You could expand that to language arts programming, CTE programming, all of that provided through this ESA level. And suddenly you're giving access to perhaps a broader range of kind of enriching programming to students that may not have access to it today. So you can look at these as a way of potentially expanding access to programming as well down the road. First, I would say focus on services that school districts are already providing and try to get some efficiency out of that. But long term, there's an opportunity to expand access to program. Under sort of

[Speaker 0]: this cooperative model, however, it's really up to the member districts what they want their ESA to provide.

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: So the way we envision this is that there would be a set of mandatory services that would have to be provided through the ESA and then let them just figure out if other services they want to provide. And this is one of the things like as we get into governance, which is still a couple of slides away. But as you get into sort of a governance conversation of what is the role of the leader of that ESA? And one of the roles really would probably be, okay, figure out what other areas you can align program outside of the ones that are required in statute. And so that really starts to talk, you start to talk about an innovation perspective. Like what can we innovate in terms of working together outside of the box that's been drawn?

[Unidentified Committee Member]: I'm still struggling to see representing SUs in my region that have multiple school districts within them. I'm still struggling to see the difference between just what you're describing as these 15 ESAs and with as you're talking about what they provide. Yes. SUs are doing all of those things right now and and choosing at times which to join together on and which not which program programming. You know, it could be curriculum. It could be, you know, sharing of staff. I mean, they do that all the time. And so I'm still struggling between the difference between an ESA or a supervisor. They feel very much the same to me.

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: In a lot of ways, they are the same. Yeah. In a lot of ways, they are the same. But it's sort of a reframing and also scaling up, Because we're going from 52 to 15. Yeah, I get that. And so, yeah, they very much are in a lot of ways the same thing. Is thinking about it like, okay, right now there's very limited number of services that are required, even though there are a range of services that they do provide in practice. Getting a little more scale, but also making sure that those services are a little more uniform statewide. And that shifts in focus for the SU would be to those to shift away from a little bit away from district governance, if that makes sense, and more towards how do we find ways to work together. All right. So I'll just touch on this really briefly,

[Chris Taylor (Vice Chair)]: and

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: I know I'm starting to bump up against the lunch hour.

[Speaker 0]: So, I mean, people have had a lot of questions. Sorry. Not your fault. It's not fault.

[Chris Taylor (Vice Chair)]: It's not your fault.

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: Don't wanna be between folks and their lunch. So the the starting point for this that we would recommend is the text the tech center regions is the sort of the starting point. There was a map that the task force was looking at that was sort of similar to this, where there was some districts that were moved from one side of one of these lines to another. I think there's going to be some of that if we pursue a model like this. But I think this is a good starting point in terms of if we're gonna do ESAs and we're gonna vertically align pre K through 12 and CTE in sort of a comprehensive way, we think this is the best starting point for that.

[Speaker 0]: I'm just pausing. I had to slip out to a meeting, but I keep going at the table here. We'll keep the conversation going. Thank you. So

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: we did a cost savings estimate based on some of those assumptions. We'd go to 15 regional ESAs. We looked at some of the cost savings that other states had generated moving to ESAs in specific categories. So we didn't necessarily look at just generically what was saved. We looked at over a dozen different specific spending categories and attached an estimated savings number to each one based on experiences other states had had. And then we applied that to Vermont's actual spending in those categories for the FY '22 school year. And the number we came up with was $133,000,000 in savings from just the SU consolidation component, and then another 200,000,000 in potential savings from pushing additional services from the district level up to the new ESA model. So a total of $333,000,000 Again, that's in $20.22 dollars So if you were to say we're gonna do this for FY '28 or '29, savings would scale up based on inflation. We did estimate this in another way just to see if there was a variation in the outcome. And the way we did this is we took the Miller report that I spoke about earlier that looked at cost savings or school spending in the year prior to merger and the year following merger and which specific spending categories went up and down, because you actually went down to that level of detail. And the assumption we made here is that we would get the administrative savings that was found during Act 46, as well as the service savings, but not experience the increase in salary and benefits that we saw during act 46. And if we made that assumption that an ESA model gets those administrative cost savings, but does not have the additional cost of the salary and benefit level up, we come out of $291,000,000 in savings. So pretty close to our three thirty million dollar number. Both of those numbers are let me not skip ahead just yet. All those numbers are between 1214% total education spending today. And that's interesting because that's also pretty close to that number we talked about at the beginning, which was 16 of the variation in spending could be explained by the size of the supervisory. So if you take away scale and made them all uniform, and again, this is a thought exercise, a practical, something that's practical, you would remove 16% of the spending from the equation by doing that. So all three of those ways of looking at it come out at a pretty close number. Then we looked at, okay, well, does $300,000,000 in savings in our education delivery system look like? And so we applied this to FY $27 in the education fund outlook. And we assumed that we would split it evenly, 150,000,000 towards homestead property tax and 150,000,000 towards non homestead property taxes, and you end up with a pretty significant reduction on the property tax side of the equation. Now, again, you're not necessarily going to take all of those savings and invest 100% of it in property tax buy down. This is more of a thought exercise again, because some of that you're probably going to invest in startup costs. Some of it you're going to invest in construction costs probably down the road as you might wanna move towards a comprehensive high school model. So not a 100% of it's gonna go to property tax buy downs, but if it did, this is what it would look like, potentially. And I've got several slides on governance and what governance could look like. I already am sort of out of time. So I guess I will pause there and ask for any additional questions on this sort of concept as a whole.

[Chris Taylor (Vice Chair)]: Anybody wanna dive deeper into the governance part of it?

[Beth Quimby (Member)]: Well, I'm fine to keep going. I read ahead.

[Chris Taylor (Vice Chair)]: So I have

[Beth Quimby (Member)]: questions but I don't want to poll other people here. Either keep going or have you come back for more testimony in another day.

[Chris Taylor (Vice Chair)]: Is it more of a question?

[Beth Quimby (Member)]: Are people okay for like fifteen more minutes? I am giving someone a reply, but I think they're okay too, because their committee's about done. It just may be easier than us. Yeah, whatever works.

[Chris Taylor (Vice Chair)]: If you've got a few more minutes, yeah, I've got a

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: few more minutes. Happy to stick around. Yeah, if

[Chris Taylor (Vice Chair)]: you want to continue on with some of the governance, I think, we're ready to ask you

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: questions from the governor's. Yes, I'm sure. And I will say on the governance component of this, we sort of envisioned the governance for the new ESAs to work pretty similarly to the existing SU governance. So that was our starting point because that's something that's familiar. We can kind of wrap our arms around it. However, that does not necessarily need to be the case. There is, as Chair touched on earlier, there's other governance models for ESAs and other governance models for school districts that exist out there. But in terms of something that's actionable to try to get towards what future state would be, we conceptualized this as a pretty similar governance model to our existing SU governments. So the ESA boards would continue to be in most cases appointed by their member districts. Again, in that sort of co op mindset of like, we're all members of this ESA. ESA budgets would be allocated back to member districts proportionally. And then one of the things that that does, by the way, is if CTE gets rolled up underneath the ESA, ESA CTE is then baked into the ESA budget. So it solves some of the fee for service funding challenges that we've had with CTE. If it's baked into the ESA budget and you're paying for CTE through those allocations, know, regardless of somewhat regardless of utilization of service.

[Beth Quimby (Member)]: Can Can I I ask ask a question? It says ESA budgets would be allocated back to member districts proportionally. Portionally. So I guess I'm trying to get my head around how that compares with weighting and all of the other factors in our education funding system that are not just about, we don't just proportionally allocate dollars.

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: Yeah, I

[Beth Quimby (Member)]: think foundation formula does not contemplate that either because there's still a lot of weights in that.

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: Yeah, I think the way I would look at this is, again, looking back at how have SU solved that problem today as a service provider. So I kind of look at that as a solved problem, how they do the proportional allocation. And in some cases, non proportional allocation, depending on like special ed, for example, you have and extraordinary cost student. There's a certain break for that that exists today and how you do it for that. There's a lot of these things that are even sorted out for us to use. So it's taking those learnings and applying it to the ESA. It is worth noting here that roles and responsibilities of school leaders would adapt under a concept like this. I think one of the areas that is most likely to be impacted is that the relationship between principals, superintendents, school boards likely change, the dynamics there change, because suddenly the superintendent has a much larger number of schools that they're working with in terms of providing If a superintendent stays with the ESA, there's another conversation to have there, but if they stay with ESA or the consolidated SU or however you want to think about it, that dynamic does change. And potentially what happens there is that school boards get much more hands on with the principals in school buildings. That can be a good or a bad thing, depending on who you ask. But it's worth noting that that could happen if you don't necessarily have that executive leadership at the school board level that a superintendent might have today. There are ways of solving for that, and I can talk about some of the ways we've thought about solving that. But it's worth noting that if your chief executive follows the essay from 52 down 15, that just by default means you're gonna have more schools that that chief executive involved with.

[Beth Quimby (Member)]: Obviously, my facial expression is not exactly, I'm not a good booker player. Huge alarm bells and concerns here on taking this from theoretical, but we're actually talking about schools and school structures, which are very different than businesses in many ways. And that piece there just terrifies me when we think about the quality and what actually happens in schools. And we need instructional leaders. I mean, one of the problems in our system right now is that our instructional leaders are doing too many things and not enough instructional leading. And I think that is probably the biggest component of some of our achievement challenges. But principals are instructional leaders, as are superintendents. But principals are incredibly important instructional leaders. And if they're at the whims of school boards that are elected I've been on one. Many of us here have been around one. I mean, school board members are doing their best, but these are volunteer elected, whether they just happen to have a background in accounting or just happen to be really pissed off about the decisions the schools made about math curriculum that have driven them to get on the school board. We're talking. That would just really scare me as the principals are sort of the core instructional leaders in our system are at the whims of a whole lot of elected volunteer boards. I mean, to me, I'm already concerned about how much we've politicized education in the state right now. We're pushing that politicization down further and further and further. If at the school level, they're highly responsive to elected boards. Just see a potential for real challenges around quality, around equity, and around our principals just, are they educational leaders or are they kind of pawns in the sort of political whims of a community, of a state, of a time that we're in, whatever it is.

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: That's valid concern. I think there's a couple of thoughts about that that we've talked about with our advisory council. And that is a risk. I think the other way you could look at that is it gets school boards closer to on the ground too, because you don't have this mid level management component between principals who are often very much involved in boots on the ground and the superintendent who's like one step removed from that. And then having a lot of that information and conversation flowing through that single point of contact, that's one step removed from what's happening on the ground. So it potentially gets school boards more engaged with what's happening in their actual buildings. The other thing I would say to this, and I've got a slide on this is you're absolutely right that there's a vacuum of leadership at the state level. Because right now what we see is there is 52 educational leaders that are trying to each sort out what education looks like in their domain. And that leads to a lack of coordination. So there very much is a vacuum of leadership at the statewide level in terms of what do we expect our schools to do? What are the performance outcomes we expect? Quite frankly, what are the costs that we expect? And foundation formula is one way of addressing the cost side of the equation. We are very concerned about the performance side. Like the thing that's dramatically different between You can almost copy and paste a lot of the conversations we're having in this building today to 2014 and the conversations we're having about Act 46. It's almost the exact same conversations in a lot of ways. The thing that's changed significantly is in 2014, Vermont was ranked top five in the country for math and reading, both fourth and eighth grade levels. That is not true today. We've seen a dramatic decline in quality in the last decade. And so that is a major concern for us, we need some of that statewide accountability, but that also needs to be able, we need to figure out how to apply that all the way down to the school building level and the school leadership with the principal, like hold the principal accountable. And that primarily, I think, at first level, that's the school board's role is to hold their school leaders accountable. But if they're not, then we need a statewide mechanism like we see in other states. Like I'll pick on Massachusetts, cause they have a pretty robust statewide accountability mechanism that steps in and says, okay, you're not meeting your obligation to students. And here's how we're going to fix that. And I know that's scary for a lot of people, like to say, oh, the state gets done and say you're not meeting your obligations to students. But if we want things to improve, needs to be some sort of accountability. And that's the one we've seen in other states and that other states employed successfully. I do touch on that in the last slide here in terms of what the role of the agency and the State Board of Education and the legislature is in terms of setting some of those statewide expectations and how that might filter down to a school board or a principal level. But I think it comes back to having that accountability framework.

[Chris Taylor (Vice Chair)]: Any further questions from any?

[Beth Quimby (Member)]: I just have a comment that I think the framework isn't correct. I think it's the superintendent who holds principles accountable, not the stewards.

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: In the current paradigm, yes.

[Beth Quimby (Member)]: In any system moving forward, that's the way it should be.

[Chris Taylor (Vice Chair)]: We'll go with Beth's. Those would all be policy. We would make here at this table. I appreciate the way you all approach this. Again, I appreciate the way you presented it. Very, very pragmatic way of approaching it. Thank you very much.

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: Think it's helpful to you and your work because there's a lot of things to navigate, as you

[Chris Taylor (Vice Chair)]: know. Yeah,

[Beth Quimby (Member)]: I just had a question. So the numbers that were put together as far as contributing to these cost savings because of the ESAs would still be possible even if we took control of the governance and we went on a different path with the governance, right?

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: Yeah. This is a debate we had when the task force was working on the CISA concept is could you leave SUs in place and just have the superintendent be the only thing at the SU level and then have the CISA or the ESA above that and still do all the other stuff. But the SU remains just for those chief executive functionality from a superintendent. And that's certainly possible. We felt like that wasn't quite as clean, which is why we didn't necessarily pose it that way. But it's certainly something that could be done. If feel strongly that having that chief executive for the school board that kind of unifies that single point of contact for all the member schools or districts or whatnot. If you feel like that's important, you could leave SUs in place and just leave the superintendent and then pull out other routes up. Yes, they should be insane.

[Beth Quimby (Member)]: Right. And it would still continue to save even more money if locally schools and districts decided to consolidate and schools decided to go to those regional high schools. Like that would not change anything downward about the savings, would just change it up, correct?

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: Yes, consolidation on top of

[Beth Quimby (Member)]: the proposal.

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: If there were savings there, would get on top of it. And again, most of those savings are probably going to be in the districts that are below 300. And so, there are some cost savings there in specific areas, but if you totaled up all of the districts that are under 300 and even cut their spending in half, it's not a whole lot of cost savings. You go through a lot of effort for not a lot of gain there potentially in terms of a statewide policy.

[Beth Quimby (Member)]: Except that I think that one of the challenges of our current, like we're talking a lot about district scale, here school scale has to be considered. That's actually where a lot of the, probably the larger savings and the larger quality and opportunity conversation is. So, more very small districts you have making decisions about schools, the less likely you are to have some painful but potentially helpful in the long run consolidation at the school level. Building level. School level costs and

[Ben Kinsley (Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont)]: Yeah, building, I mean, there are underutilized buildings everywhere. Our education system, a good friend of mine happens to be the chair of the Essex Westford School District, one of the largest ones in the state, and they have an underutilized building. So it's, I think, size that we have in our existing system, there are probably buildings that are. I appreciate it. Thank you very much. Thank you very much.