Christian family sues Vermont over restrictions on public tuition aid to religious schools
A family is suing Vermont education officials over a recently enacted law that effectively prohibits public tuition assistance for students attending religious schools.
Filed Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Vermont, the complaint alleges that Vermont officials are discriminating against religious schools through their Town Tuition Program and the Dual Enrollment Program.
The case was brought by the Bishop family and their child, identified as A.B. in the complaint, against Vermont Agency of Education Secretary Zoie Saunders, Vermont State Board of Education Chair Tammy Kolbe and the Barstow Unified Union School District.
A.B. is a senior at Mount St. Joseph Academy, a Catholic high school in Rutland. The Bishops, who live in North Chittenden, are nondenominational Christians. Their school district, Barstow Unified, does not operate a high school and pays tuition for students to attend school elsewhere. Vermont’s Dual Enrollment Program, which lets high school juniors and seniors take college courses for free, is open to private school students only if they receive town tuition.
The lawsuit claims that officials unlawfully prohibited these public benefit programs from being used by students to enroll in religious schools, making the Bishop family “the victims of Vermont’s latest recipe of religious discrimination.”
“This Court should order injunctive and declaratory relief ending Defendants’ ongoing religious discrimination so that A.B. can participate in the Town Tuition and Dual Enrollment Programs during her last year of school,” the lawsuit states.
The Bishops are being represented by Alliance Defending Freedom, a legal nonprofit that has won religious liberty cases at the U.S. Supreme Court.
“Parents should be able to send their children to schools that are the best fit for them, and the First Amendment protects parents’ right to choose religious schools,” said ADF Legal Counsel Jake Reed in a statement.
“Yet after decades and multiple court rulings protecting religious freedom, Vermont continues to discriminate against religious families and schools. Such unequal treatment violates the First Amendment, and government officials must be held accountable.”
In 2020, four Catholic high school students, their parents and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Burlington sued Vermont over its tuition program barring faith-based schools from eligibility.
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued an emergency injunction in January 2021 in favor of the plaintiffs. Officials eventually agreed to allow religious schools into the program in 2022, after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Carson v. Makin that Maine could not exclude religious schools from a similar tuition program.
In July 2025, however, Vermont's Republican Gov. Phil Scott signed Act 73, a sweeping education reform law that changed the standards for which independent schools could receive public tuition assistance.
Under the new law, an independent school must be located in a school district that does not have a public school available for some or all grades, must have had at least 25% of its students in the 2023-24 school year funded by a public school district, and must meet minimum class-size requirements unless granted a waiver. Students already receiving public tuition at schools that lost eligibility can continue receiving it until they graduate.
According to the complaint, A.B. received town tuition at Mount St. Joseph in 2024-25 and qualified for Act 73’s grandfather clause. But after she briefly withdrew in fall 2025 to take classes at Rutland High School alongside a vocational program, the Barstow school board denied her tuition for this year. The board interpreted the clause’s “until they graduate” language to mean “until they leave,” the complaint states. The Bishops are now paying tuition themselves.
As a result of Act 73’s new provisions, the 12 religious schools that had received public tuition funding were deemed ineligible for that money, VTDigger reported in August 2025. A few secular schools were also affected, and the number of private schools eligible for public tuition dropped from 46 to 18, Vermont Public reported.
ADF is also challenging Act 73 on behalf of Mid Vermont Christian School in Quechee, which argues the law’s criteria were designed to exclude religious schools.
Peter Teachout, a professor at Vermont Law School, told VTDigger that the new law appeared to be religiously neutral, and so any legal challenge must prove that the new regulations were “somehow surrogates for excluding private, religious, independent schools.”
“That would have to be the argument: that in fact, the Legislature was seeking to exclude private, religious schools, and then it came up with non-religious criteria that would achieve that consequence,” Teachout said.
“That would be an extremely hard case to make, because the state is absolutely free to decide which independent schools get funding or don’t get funding, provided the criteria are not exclusively based on religion.”
