Vermont paid $566,000 last spring to settle a religious discrimination lawsuit against a Christian school.
They were already building the replacement.
What Vermont built to replace it is costing Christian seniors free college credits they can never recover.
Vermont Has Been Discriminating Against Christian School Choice for Sixty Years
Vermont's Town Tuition Program dates to 1869 – the oldest school choice program in America.
If your town had no public school, the state paid your tuition somewhere else.
For most of that history, Vermont drew one line: secular private schools got the check, and Christian schools got nothing.
Vermont defended that position in court for decades and lost.
The 2nd Circuit ruled their exclusion violated the First Amendment, and the U.S. Supreme Court made it permanent in 2022 when it ruled 6-3 in Carson v. Makin that Maine's identical policy was unconstitutional.
Vermont settled two separate lawsuits after those rulings – agreed to include religious schools, reimbursed families who had paid out of pocket, and paid attorney fees.
Then Vermont Democrats passed Act 73.
Vermont Act 73 Was Built to Do What Losing on First Amendment Grounds Couldn't
Act 73 imposed new compliance requirements on schools in the Town Tuition Program – conditions that require Christian schools to abandon their biblical views on marriage and sexuality to stay eligible.
Vermont Democrats knew exactly what would happen.
Every religious school in the program was immediately cut from Town Tuition, Dual Enrollment, and Early College while secular schools kept every benefit.
Mid Vermont Christian School had already beaten Vermont once on a related front – the state expelled the school from sports competitions because it forfeited a girls' basketball game rather than put a biological male on the floor – and the Vermont Principals' Association paid $566,000 in April 2026 to settle that portion of the lawsuit.
The tuition fight is now before the 2nd Circuit, where oral arguments were heard in September.
Vermont Dual Enrollment Program Now Bars Christian Seniors From Free College Credits
The new lawsuit – Bishop v. Saunders, filed October 28 in federal court – involves a family whose daughter is in her final year of high school.
Vermont's Dual Enrollment Program gives qualifying high school students free college courses at no cost to their families, but private school students can only participate if they receive Town Tuition funding first.
The family's daughter attends a religious high school, which means no Town Tuition under Act 73 and no Dual Enrollment either.
Her classmates at secular private schools take free college courses.
She watches them go.
"Vermont's message is clear: Religious schools and their families are treated as second-class in this state," said ADF Legal Counsel Jake Reed.
"No religious school qualifies for Town Tuition funding, and no family who wants to send their kids to a religious school can reap the benefits of their own tax dollars."
Sixty years of documented pattern backs that up.
The Religious Freedom Workaround Every Liberal State Is Now Watching
Every Democrat-run state capitol in America is watching this.
You can't openly defy the Supreme Court on religious liberty – the courts will shut you down.
But you can pass compliance mandates that sound neutral while engineered to be impossible for religious institutions to satisfy – Vermont Democrats called it anti-discrimination law, then used it as a new mechanism for the same discrimination.
The Supreme Court handed Vermont three escalating warnings: Trinity Lutheran in 2017, Espinoza v. Montana in 2020, and Carson v. Makin in 2022 – the same instruction each time: you cannot exclude religious schools from programs open to secular ones.
Vermont Democrats answered each one by rebuilding the exclusion under a different legal name.
The 2nd Circuit will now decide whether Act 73 survives – or whether Vermont pays attorney fees and starts engineering a fourth attempt while real families keep paying out of pocket for courses their secular neighbors get free.
Sources:
- Alliance Defending Freedom, "Vermont Can't Discriminate Against Religious Schools," ADF Legal, December 12, 2022.
- Alliance Defending Freedom, "From the Hardwood to the Classroom, Vermont Keeps Targeting Religious Schools," ADF Legal, October 28, 2026.
- Alliance Defending Freedom, "Mid Vermont Christian School v. Saunders," ADF Media, September 21, 2026.
- Sarah Parshall Perry and Jonathan Butcher, "Supreme Court Upholds School Choice, Free Exercise in Maine Case," Daily Signal, June 21, 2022.
- Misty Severi, "Vermont family sues state for discriminating against religious families, schools," Just the News, October 28, 2026.
