This is part of a multi-part series examining school district regionalization in New York State. Read the full series below:
In an era where educational challenges are increasingly complex and interconnected, collaboration between school districts and their local Boards of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES) has emerged as a powerful strategy for driving systemic improvement. The Rockefeller Institute of Government’s earlier blog described how small, sparsely populated, and rural districts could pursue regionalization strategies as a means to improve academic opportunities for students and save costs for local residents. Across New York State, regional initiatives are demonstrating how a shared vision, pooled resources, and strategic cooperation can create innovative and meaningful improvements for school districts, their staff, and their students.
Examples of more recent and emerging regional approaches in three key educational areas—leadership development, literacy instruction, and operational efficiency—can help lend insight into the potential of school district regionalization efforts. While they represent newer initiatives, they illustrate the types of efforts whose impacts should be carefully studied to understand how shared resources and collaborations can best be leveraged to the benefit of students, staff, school leadership, and communities.
Leadership Development
In the Capital Region, the Urban Superintendents’ Leadership Academy—facilitated by ILO Group—is an innovative example of cross-district collaboration. With services first beginning in May 2025, this partnership between the Albany and Schenectady school districts aims to strengthen the educational leadership pipeline through a shared, multitiered professional development model. By investing collectively in the training and coaching of aspiring and early-career teachers, schools, and district leaders, the initiative aims to not only address challenges like leadership turnover but also to build regional capacity for instructional innovation, including the integration of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence. Rather than a generic solution, the academy provides targeted, hands-on training that reflects the unique needs of the local city school districts and of each leadership role, all supported by interdistrict resources. The program is designed to produce measurable outcomes of the district’s vision to grow excellent academic and administrative leaders, with the aim of developing a model worthy of replication across the state.
Literacy Instruction
Meanwhile, in the North Country, St. Lawrence-Lewis BOCES is demonstrating how cooperative leadership can transform literacy instruction across its 18 component districts. By partnering with SUNY New Paltz to offer a Science of Reading Fundamentals microcredential, BOCES is in the midst of a multiyear professional development effort to train and empower educators in multiple districts on how best to adopt research-based literacy instructional approaches, aligning the approach with the New York State Education Department’s statewide Literacy Initiative. Through shared professional development programming, access to expert-led sessions, and curated curriculum evaluation tools, the region is replacing outdated instructional methods with evidence-based practices that are designed to achieve better and more equitable literacy outcomes for all students.
Operational Efficiency
Operational collaboration can also help reduce bureaucracy, administrative delays, and costs for school districts. The Wayne-Finger Lakes BOCES Central Business Office (CBO) exemplifies how shared services can enhance efficiency and reliability. By centralizing key financial functions such as payroll, accounts payable, and benefits administration across the BOCES’s 25-member school districts, the CBO allows districts to reduce administrative burdens and redirect efforts, focus, and resources toward their core mission: educating students. Participating districts benefit from cost savings, expert and expanded financial support from centralized staff, and strong and more consistent internal controls and compliance, all while improving service delivery. Early estimates of cost savings for the region’s school districts (combined) range from $180,000 per year under very conservative assumptions to a more realistic $500,000 or more annually.1 Maybe more significantly, centralizing staff has allowed the BOCES to employ highly qualified, certified, and degreed experts as treasurers and accountants, positions that many smaller school districts have difficulty filling on their own. When individual districts experience extended vacancies or absences in these positions, the stability and integrity of financial services can become jeopardized; by centralizing staff in the regional BOCES’s CBO with a few treasurers and auditors, critical financial functions are always covered by others in the event of an absence.2 Additionally, because BOCES is independent of its districts, the segregation of duties required by financial audits naturally occurs, a practice that is very difficult for small districts with a limited number of business office staff to maintain.
Taken together, the impacts of these regionalization initiatives, though distinct in focus, appear to reflect a unifying theme: that working together provides opportunities for greater impact than working alone. Whether it’s nurturing the next generation of educational leaders, aligning literacy practices with cutting-edge research, or streamlining business operations, the partnership between districts and BOCES illustrates the potential power of regional collaboration. More research and more pioneering and innovative partnerships among districts are needed to understand how collective investment and shared responsibility can create new and smarter systems that better serve students, educators, schools, districts, and their communities. The initiatives undertaken by the Albany and Schenectady City School Districts, the constituent member school districts of the St. Lawrence-Lewis BOCES, and the Wayne-Finger Lakes BOCES are a good start, and analysis of the outcomes of these efforts will serve to inform regionalization efforts of all types throughout New York State.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Anita Murphy is a retired district superintendent of Capital Region BOCES. Prior to her services as district superintendent and CEO of Capital Region BOCES, Ms. Murphy served as superintendent of schools at Altmar-Parish-Williamstown Central School District, deputy superintendent in both the Rochester City and Syracuse City School Districts, director of instruction in the City School District of Albany, associate commissioner for curriculum, instruction and field services at the New York State Education Department, and a teacher and director of instructional data at the Binghamton City School District.
[1] Conversation and email exchange by author with Wayne-Finger Lakes BOCES CBO leadership, June 2025.
[2] Conversation and email exchange by author with Wayne-Finger Lakes BOCES CBO leadership, June 2025.