This story by Alex Hanson was first published in the Valley News on August 10.
WOODSTOCK — The board of the Woodstock-based Mountain Views Supervisory Union voted on Monday to join a Board of Cooperative Education Services (BOCES) with seven other supervisory unions and districts.
The unanimous vote makes Mountain Views the first supervisory union in the state to join a BOCES, a structure that’s in wide use in a majority of states but that wasn’t enabled under Vermont law until last year.
A BOCES allows school units to band together to share services that require greater expertise or that entail extra costs. Mountain Views Superintendent Sherry Sousa has been meeting with her seven counterparts for the past five years, a collaboration that has resulted in both cost savings and better services in special education and professional development.
“The southeast region is an incredibly collaborative group with shared goals and expectations for their students,” Sousa said in an interview.
Now that the region has crafted articles of agreement, officials hope that document can become a template that other parts of the state could use to create their own BOCES, Sousa said. While a state task force is trying to draw new school district boundaries, superintendents and school boards are enacting reforms of their own.
“We want a working model of what a BOCES is in Vermont, and we want to move that to other parts of Vermont,” Sousa said.
There are currently no BOCES in Vermont, but several supervisory unions have met with state Agency of Education officials to discuss what a BOCES might look like, Toren Ballard, a spokesperson for the agency, said in an email.
So far, Mountain Views’ collaboration with other districts has taken the form of improving services for students with special needs and providing professional development for educators, Sousa said. That effort has had the effect of reducing the number of costly out-of-district placements. Special education is a challenge for public schools, which are required by federal law to provide services, but are only partially reimbursed for them with federal money.
With the help of the collaborative, Mountain Views created a program for students at risk of not completing their schooling.
The district has special education programs at every grade level that are supported by the collaborative’s expertise and training, Sousa said.
As a result, the district has relatively few out of district placements, which saves money and also better serves students, she said.
“The collaborative is critical to making that happen,” Sousa said.
Sousa has seen dramatic changes in a 30-year career in special education. New teachers now come out of undergraduate and graduate programs with far less training in special education, she said. That puts the burden on either school districts or the state to provide professional development. The state does much less of that than it used to, she noted.
The hope is that a BOCES can fill that void. Many states enable such structures, which also are called education service agencies, education service districts, education collaboratives or regional education service agencies.
Such collaboration is not particularly new, either.
Hartford School District for many years ran the Hartford Collaborative, and still operates the Hartford Regional Resource Center, for students with developmental delays and multiple disabilities, and HARP, the Hartford Autism Regional Program.
But financial pressures, as Vermont’s student population has declined and need for student services has risen, have led local school officials to seek new ways to deliver common services at lower costs. The threat of a major restructuring of education also has served as a call to action at the local level, Sousa said.
In introducing the BOCES bill, H.630, in 2023, state Rep. Rebecca Holcombe, D-Norwich, testified that BOCES can be used for a wide range of initiatives, from operating alternative schools to improving curriculum, standards and assessment to collective bargaining and negotiating transportation and food service contracts.
“You can’t build and maintain the expertise that you need in individual schools,” Holcombe said in an interview. It can be done at the regional level instead.
Holcombe, who served as Vermont Education secretary from 2014 to 2018, also sits on the task force that’s supposed to draw a new school district map by December. BOCES and other regional reforms hold greater promise for improving teaching and learning and saving money, she said.
If a collaborative can help teachers improve learning in the early grades, then students won’t need as much costly intervention later on, she said.
The Legislature approved the BOCES bill in 2024, and Gov. Phil Scott let it become law without his signature. At the time, all of the talk in education was about a substantial increase in property taxes and the BOCES bill received virtually no public notice. Holcombe said she’s glad to see it bearing fruit.
“I think you really have to give these districts credit for putting this idea together,” she said.
The southeastern Vermont BOCES covers Windsor County from Woodstock south, and all of Windham County and comprises at least 8,000 students.
In addition to Mountain Views, Windsor Southeast Supervisory Union, which comprises Hartland, Windsor, West Windsor and Weathersfield, is also part of the collaborative. Its board is slated to discuss and vote on joining the BOCES on Sept. 22, Superintendent Christine Bourne said.
The collaborative, which has had a director for the past three years, has provided assistance with recruiting and hiring special education staff and with professional development around such subjects as hazing, harassment and bullying and special education law, Bourne said.
“That’s been really beneficial, and provided at a reasonable cost, so staff that want to participate can participate,” Bourne said of the professional development.
“In the future, I think we’ll be able to pool resources,” she said, which could include a program for special education students who need a new placement. “We’re still in development, but the possibility for a lot of cost savings is there,” as well as additional collaborative services.
Asked to quantify how the BOCES has saved money for her district, Sousa could not provide figures, but noted that every student who stays in the district instead of being placed in an expensive program outside the public system is a major cost savings.
“We talk about restructuring education in Vermont,” she said. “This is a real opportunity.”
