By Corey McDonald/VTDigger
The White River Valley Supervisory Union last week moved to withdraw its membership from the Vermont School Boards Association, highlighting deep divisions among the state’s school districts and supervisory unions over the trajectory of education reform.
The White River Valley board’s decision marks an overt break in unity with a prominent advocacy organization at a critical time for public education in Vermont.
State lawmakers are working overtime to strike a deal on legislation that would lay the groundwork for major systemic reform in the coming months. House and Senate members have endured weeks of strained negotiations, and leaders in both chambers, along with Gov. Phil Scott, said they were committed to working out a compromise on the bill, H.454, by June 16, when lawmakers are scheduled to reconvene for a vote.
The Vermont School Board Association collects annual membership dues from every school district in the state and lobbies on behalf of its members.
The White River Valley Supervisory Union, a collection of eight schools, with six districts that serves students from 10 central Vermont towns, was paying the association roughly $10,000 a year in membership dues, according to Kathy Galluzzo, chair of the supervisory union’s board.
But in recent weeks, board members with the supervisory union questioned the association’s lobbying efforts. At a May 27 meeting, board members had strong words for the association’s support for legislation that would do away with supervisory unions.
“They don’t believe in us, so they can’t lobby for us,” supervisory union board member Bill Edgerton said at the meeting.
Leaders of the Vermont School Boards Association said the majority of the organization’s members support its position on supervisory unions.
In a press release announcing the decision, White River Valley Supervisory Union board members said their withdrawal arose from disagreements around the association’s support for versions of H.454 that they said would result in “long bus rides for students, the dissolution of supervisory unions, no community involvement in decisions surrounding the future of rural schools, and no path to tax relief for Vermonters.”
The statement went on to say that the association’s advocacy went “against the communities that WRVSU serves and the children they educate.”
The White River Valley Supervisory Union is the first to break with the association, but it may not be the last.
Districts within the Lamoille South, Twin Rivers and Greater Rutland County supervisory unions have had similar discussions and plan to consider resolutions this month to suspend their dues or withdraw their membership, according to board meeting minutes and interviews with board members.
In Windham County, board members with the Windham Southeast Supervisory District — one of two districts in the Windham Southeast Supervisory Union — voted on a resolution calling on the association to refrain from supporting legislation “not grounded in sound research or lacking clear fiscal impact modeling, especially on consequential issues like school governance and consolidation.”
Timothy Maciel, a board member with the southern Vermont school district, in an interview said the board would consider suspending their dues to the association “if basic standards of democratic representation and accountability are not met.”
“There’s really good folks in the VSBA,” he said. “But primarily, they have to represent our values and positions. If they aren’t representing those values, then we, in my opinion, shouldn’t continue with them.”
Why supervisory unions?
Vermont has 52 supervisory unions or supervisory districts — two different governing and administrative models for the state’s 119 school districts.
State law only gives school districts the power to set budgets and to raise money through issuing bonds. A supervisory union or supervisory district generally provides back office functions such as accounting and payroll and may oversee the provision of special education services and curriculum coordination, though their specific roles differ across the state.
The supervisory union structure, which was relied upon during the push for school district consolidation driven by Act 46, provides a unifying structure for school districts with vastly different operating structures — a way for them to share resources while maintaining independence.
The White River Valley Supervisory Union is a particularly diverse example, with six districts following four different operating models. One of the school districts — the White River Union District, for the towns of Bethel and Royalton — operates all grades from pre-kindergarten through high school. Another, serving Granville and Hancock, operates none, and provides tuition to its resident students to attend the public and private schools they choose.
Of the other four districts, two pay tuition and allow choice for middle school and high school for the towns of Rochester, Sharon and Stockbridge, while two provide tuition and choice just for high school for the towns of Chelsea, Strafford and Tunbridge.
The school choice allowed in five of the six districts in the White River Valley Supervisory Union lets students attend private schools like nearby Thetford Academy and Sharon Academy.
Flor Diaz Smith, the president of the Vermont School Boards Association, said supervisory unions make it difficult to “have aligned outcomes and support for all our students.”
“We’re trying to create coherence through this system,” she said.
Complicating matters is the number of public school students that districts across the state are paying to send to private schools. There were around 3,500 students using public money for private school tuition in the 2022-23 school year — a small fraction of the almost 83,000 students educated in public schools that same year, according to the Vermont Agency of Education.
But that smaller group has played a big role in the education debate, and supervisory unions that allow students publicly funded choice want to keep it that way.
Galluzzo said that school choice is an important factor for her supervisory union, and the region’s independent schools provide educational options that are often closer to home for some families.
“Families make that choice,” she said. “Kids find their fit in some of the independent schools for different reasons. I think more choice is better than less choice.”
Scott’s education proposal, unveiled in January, would have eliminated the supervisory unions’ governance structure and instead established five regional districts of roughly 10,000 to 15,000 students each, except for the Champlain Valley district, which was more than twice that size. In another change, the new districts’ boards would have been empowered to designate certain private schools as “choice schools” available to all students in the larger district via lottery.
Sue Ceglowski, the executive director of the Vermont School Boards Association, said during the White River Valley Supervisory Union Board’s meeting that the organization came out strongly against the governor’s plan.
However, the association could not publicly support legislation that required the inclusion of supervisory unions because it was “paired with allowing for the continuation of a tuitioning system that provides continued access to independent schools,” she said.
Ceglowski said most of the organization’s members supported its position on supervisory unions and that its stance was “based on resolutions that have been passed by our members.”
In an interview, Diaz Smith also said there was “a lot of interest from the supervisory union advocates to stay with [school choice], to have everybody change but them, to have this system change around them.”
“That is not collaborative,” she said. “That is not all coming to the table.”
A rural school lobby
After their vote to leave the association, the White River Valley Supervisory Union Board voted during its May 27 meeting to shift the funds that would have gone to the Vermont School Board Association to the Rural Schools Community Alliance, an organization formed in January that has quickly emerged as an advocate and lobbying arm in the State House for Vermont’s rural schools.
The board in its press release said the Alliance “has established itself as a strong ally, helping rural schools vocally oppose legislation that forces school closure.”
“We were paying an entity to lobby for us, but they were lobbying for us to be closed,” Galluzzo said in an interview Thursday. “I think at this point in time, we need to put our money toward somebody in Montpelier that is going to fight for us.”
As fears mount over the possible closure of small, rural schools, the White River Valley Supervisory Union and others have turned to the Rural Schools Community Alliance to advocate on their behalf as education reform has progressed this session.
Since its formation in January, the alliance has grown to represent more than 100 towns in the state, according to Margaret MacLean, a steering committee member with the organization.
She said the Alliance sees supervisory unions “as essential structures for rural schools,” that offer more democratic representation and local control for smaller communities.
MacLean and her organization have come out against Scott’s proposal for five regional districts, and said that consolidated structures won’t work “when you have towns that are distinct and separated by geography and mileage.”
“We don’t see that as more efficient. We see that as less democratic,” she said. “Yes, democracy can sometimes be messy, but the benefits of it pay off in terms of engagement and involvement and community voice in support of schools.”
Officials with the rural alliance and the school boards association have met and discussed their visions for Vermont’s public education system, both sides said. But disagreements remain between the two organizations over the efficacy of supervisory unions.
“It’s not to be difficult. It’s not to be inflexible,” Diaz Smith said. “It’s just the data was not there to support supervisory unions.”
Not everyone is on board with ditching the Vermont School Board Association. In Peacham, the school board will also take up a resolution to discuss reducing the amount of money they sent to the association.
But Mark Clough, the district board’s chair and the vice chair of the School Board Association, said he’s “heard over and over again from a lot of districts and [supervisory unions] around the state that they really want tighter controls” of schools and districts under their purview.
“The state feels, in general, that districts are the way to go, because it just provides more control to get costs and student outcomes in a better place than allowing it to just go off on its own with supervisory unions,” Clough said in an interview. “The [supervisory union] model, as good as it is for rural areas — and it does fit for some rural areas — it doesn’t fit for all regions.”
Galluzzo left open the possibility of rejoining the Association at some point in an interview. But at the May 27 meeting, board members with the supervisory union concluded they had no other choice but to withdraw their membership.
Stacey Peters, the chair of the Granville-Hancock Unified School District, which is part of the supervisory union, said during the meeting last week she considered it a matter of “life or death” for the future of their schools.
“You’re asking us to kind of sign away our livelihood here, and I think that that is not a simple difference of opinion,” she said at the meeting. “Being asked to pay for our own execution does not feel like a position that I think we should be supporting.”
