Executive Summary
From Four Superintendents to One
Windsor Southeast Supervisory Union employs the staff, runs the payroll, keeps the books and negotiates the contracts for three school districts: Hartland, Mt. Ascutney and Weathersfield. Each district still has its own board, its own budget and its own vote on Town Meeting Day. None of them has ever run a business office of its own; the central office has always done that work. What changed over the past two decades is who leads it, and how much of it Vermont law requires rather than merely permits.
#Four superintendents, then one
The business of running the districts (payroll, accounting, grant management) has always sat in the central office, and so has the Director of Special Education. What was not shared was the superintendency. Until 2009, the four districts then in Windsor Southeast had four superintendents between them; Windsor had one of its own. In July of that year the supervisory union board consolidated them, in the board's own account written for the State Board of Education eight years later:
In July of 2009, the supervisory union board decided to end the practice of "siloed" leadership … and strengthen instructional and operational leadership at the SU level by hiring a full-time superintendent and instructional leaders for curriculum and special education, as well as for financial operations and human resources.
Windsor Southeast Joint 706 Study Committee, final report to the State Board of Education, December 2017
Four superintendencies became one, and the decision put SU-level leadership behind curriculum and special education alongside the finance and operations the central office already carried. Technology, food service, transportation and a single master agreement covering every district's employees followed over the next several years.
#Then the law made it a duty
Much of this was already Windsor Southeast's practice by the time the legislature required it of everyone. Before 2010 the shared-services list in 16 V.S.A. § 261a was a menu: a supervisory union could provide those services "at the option of the supervisory union." Act 153 of 2010 struck that phrase. What had been optional became a duty, and the statute reads today:
The board of each supervisory union shall:
- establish a supervisory union-wide curriculum, by either developing the curriculum or assisting the member districts to develop it jointly, and ensure implementation of the curriculum;
- assist each school in the supervisory union to follow the curriculum …;
- if students residing in the supervisory union receive their education outside the supervisory union, periodically review the compatibility of the supervisory union's curriculum with those other schools;
- provide special education services on behalf of its member districts and … compensatory and remedial services, and provide or coordinate the provision of other educational services as directed by the State Board or local boards;
- provide the following services for the benefit of member districts in a manner that promotes the efficient use of financial and human resources …
- manage a system to procure and distribute goods and operational services;
- manage construction projects;
- provide financial and student data management services, including grant writing and fundraising as requested;
- negotiate with teachers and administrators … at the supervisory union level;
- provide transportation or arrange for the provision of transportation …;
- provide human resources management support; and
- provide other appropriate services according to joint agreements pursuant to section 267 of this title.
Two lines on that list are Act 153's own work. Human resources management support was not there at all before 2010; the act added it. The same act made Special Education a supervisory union duty rather than a shared option, requiring the SU to "provide special education services on behalf of its member districts." In Windsor Southeast that changed who signed the paychecks rather than who ran the program: the Director of Special Education had always been an SU position, but special-education staff were district employees until Act 153. Two years later Act 129 of 2012 widened the financial mandate one more notch, requiring the SU to employ staff qualified to provide financial and student data management services "for the supervisory union and the member districts."
#What a district may still decide for itself
The statute is not quite absolute. If the supervisory union concludes a service would be delivered better another way, the SU may ask the Secretary of Education for a waiver. An individual district cannot opt out on its own. And the requirement carries a penalty aimed squarely at taxpayers: if the Agency of Education finds a supervisory union or any one of its districts out of compliance with § 261a, education property tax rates rise by five percent in every district in the supervisory union until the problem is fixed.
#2017: The case Windsor Southeast SU made
Act 46 of 2015 pushed Vermont districts to merge into larger units. Windsor Southeast's four boards spent twenty months studying the question and, in December 2017, asked the State Board of Education for something other than a full merger: join Windsor and West Windsor into one PreK–12 district, and leave Hartland and Weathersfield as they were: autonomous PreK–8 districts, each continuing to pay 9–12 tuitioning, inside the existing supervisory union.
The argument rested on how much already ran at the SU. A merger of Hartland and Weathersfield, the committee found, would not produce savings "beyond those already being pursued at the SU level in terms of bulk purchasing, shared contracts/support services," because "the operational supports for improving student performance already exist at the supervisory union level and are applied maximally in each school in the district." Rather than merge, the districts offered to lean on the supervisory union harder even more:
Looking ahead, the districts that make up WSE, both individually and collectively commit themselves to … maximizing, within the context of existing law, the role that the current supervisory union board strategically plays in setting, implementing, and assessing district policy and educational operations.
Windsor Southeast Joint 706 Study Committee, December 2017
The State Board agreed. Windsor and West Windsor merged to become the Mt. Ascutney School District; Hartland and Weathersfield remained their own districts. That is the three-district supervisory union whose budget this book presents.
Where the money goes once it reaches the SU is the subject of How the SU money flows. The wider chronology of Vermont education law sits in Evolution of VT Education Law.