NEW YORK – Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys representing Mid Vermont Christian School and one of its families filed their opening brief with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit Wednesday.
For decades, the Vermont Agency and Board of Education banned all religious schools from the Town Tuition Program and other public benefit programs. In 2021, the 2nd Circuit held that Vermont’s exclusion of religious schools violated the First Amendment. But last year, Vermont enacted a new law, Act 73, that accomplishes the same result: religious schools and their families are yet again ineligible for the state’s public education benefits. In their brief, ADF attorneys explain how such religious discrimination by the government violates the First Amendment.
“Religious schools and the families they serve aren’t second-class citizens, yet Vermont continues to treat them as such by excluding them from a public benefit available to most non-religious private schools,” said ADF Senior Counsel David Cortman, vice president of U.S. litigation. “All parents should be able to send their kids to schools that are the best fit for them, and the First Amendment protects parents’ right to choose religious schools.”
Vermont’s tuition program pays for students residing in school districts that do not operate public high schools to attend a public school or approved private school of the students’ choice. But Vermont’s new law imposes new criteria on some, but not all, private schools. The result is that all religious approved independent schools are yet again excluded from the Town Tuition, Dual Enrollment, and Early College Programs, while the majority of secular schools remain eligible.
The brief filed in Mid Vermont Christian School v. Saunders explains how “Vermont’s history is blemished with discrimination against religious schools and families… Religious schools and families spent years seeking constitutional vindication in federal court, only to be banished again by the hostile Vermont legislature. This Court should again invalidate Vermont’s religious discrimination, reverse, and direct the entry of a preliminary injunction allowing Mid Vermont and the Partington [family] to participate in Vermont’s public-benefit programs.”
ADF attorneys filed suit against Vermont officials in 2023 after they expelled the school and its students from participating in all state-sponsored sports because the school followed its religious beliefs by forfeiting a girls’ basketball game against a male player. The Vermont Principals Association recently paid $566,000 in damages and attorneys’ fees to settle that portion of the lawsuit, but Vermont officials have excluded all religious schools, including Mid Vermont, and their students from participating in the state’s tuition program and other public benefit programs. That issue is what’s now before the 2nd Circuit.
Alliance Defending Freedom is an alliance-building, non-profit legal organization committed to protecting religious freedom, free speech, parental rights, and the sanctity of life.
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