Copyright The Associated Press
The Mid Vermont Christian School is challenging Vermont’s education reform law in federal court, arguing that the law’s set of provisions around public tuition dollars “creates a religious gerrymander and discriminates against religious approved independent schools in Vermont.” The school’s filing seeks to insert a new challenge to the 2025 law into a lawsuit already underway in the U.S. District Court in Vermont. The school filed the original lawsuit against the state in 2023 after it was banned from participating in state athletics because it forfeited against a team with a transgender player. A federal appeals court in September ruled in the school’s favor and said its teams must be allowed to participate, but returned the case to the lower court for further action. The school and families are represented in that case by lawyers with the Alliance Defending Freedom, a prominent conservative Christian legal group that has had a growing presence in Vermont education and politics. This new motion, filed on Oct. 31, challenges Act 73, the sweeping education reform bill signed into law by Republican Gov. Phil Scott in July. The Quechee-based, pre-K-12 school said in court filings that the law “now gerrymanders out and excludes all religious schools from public benefits.” The law injures the plaintiffs — several Mid Vermont Christian School students and their families, as well as the school itself — by preventing them from using public tuition dollars for the school because of the new provisions in the law, the motion argues. The filing further suggests that state lawmakers, “knowing the state couldn’t blatantly exclude just religious schools,” worked during the last legislative session to “gerrymander them out by redefining which approved independent schools could receive public tuition.” “Vermont has yet again excluded all private religious schools and their families from receiving generally available public benefits,” the complaint reads. The complaint names Vermont Education Secretary Zoie Saunders, as well as the State Board of Education and Vermont Principals’ Association as defendants. Toren Ballard, Vermont Agency of Education’s director of policy and communications, declined to comment on the pending litigation. The agency is being represented by the Office of the Vermont Attorney General. Vermont’s public tuition system allows families in districts without a public school for certain grades to use public dollars to send their children to public schools or private schools (called independent schools in state law). But under the new law, private schools must pass certain requirements to remain eligible for public funding: They must be located in a school district or supervisory union that does not operate a public school for some or all grades, and they must have had at least 25% of their student body from the 2023-24 school year funded by a Vermont public school district. As a result, 18 private schools remain eligible for public tuition dollars. Students who were already enrolled in ineligible schools prior to the law’s passing can continue receiving public dollars until they graduate. The new eligibility requirements halted the flow of public dollars toward religious schools, which had increased following the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in the Carson v. Makin case. That case held that Maine, which runs a similar tuition funding program to Vermont’s, could not award some parents a “public benefit,” specifically, tuition money, while in other cases “denying the benefit based on a recipient’s religious exercise.” As a result, more than a dozen religious schools in Vermont, like Rice Memorial High School, Mount St. Joseph Academy and Mid Vermont Christian School, had in recent years received a growing amount of public tuition dollars. Mid Vermont Christian School in its complaint called the new eligibility requirements in Act 73 “an attempted work-around” to recent court cases and suggested state lawmakers designed the law’s tuition provisions to exclude religious schools. The complaint specifically pointed to the law’s 25% public-funding floor, calling it “an arbitrary line that does not further any legitimate governmental purpose.” “The public-funding floor was created by Vermont legislators so that certain, favored, secular approved independent schools would continue to be able to receive town tuition funding and religious schools could not,” the complaint reads. The Alliance Defending Freedom did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Legal experts had previously cast doubt over whether litigation challenging Act 73’s eligibility rules would be successful. The plaintiffs would have to make the case that lawmakers developed their legislation around public tuition funding specifically to exclude religious schools — “an extremely hard case to make,” Vermont Law School’s Peter Teachout said previously. In order to consider the substance of that argument, the court will first have to decide whether to allow the challenge to Act 73 to be combined into the previously existing case, a move that the motion states the Office of the Vermont Attorney General plans to oppose. ___
