No Religious Schools Need to Apply: Vermont Voucher Law Heads to State Court of Appeals
Overview:
Act 73 reduced the number of eligible private schools from 46 to 18, and none accept conversion, leading to a third challenge to the state’s education reform law.
A religious freedom group is ramping up its legal battle over a shocking education reform law, taking its case to an appeals court this week and saying state restrictions on its curriculum unconstitutionally exclude religious schools.
The complaint, brought on behalf of Mid Vermont Christian School in Quechee with the support of the Alliance Defending Freedom, is the beginning of an escalating legal battle over Act 73, the landmark 2025 law that changed Vermont’s two-hundred-year-old urban education system. The Christian school first challenged the law in federal court last season, alleging it discriminated against religious institutions by cutting off their access to public tuition dollars.
Vermont, a state of more than 119 counties, has for more than 200 years, Vermont’s Town Tuitioning Program, allowed students in towns without a public high school to use state dollars to attend a neighboring town school, public or private. Before Act 73, about 46 private schools were eligible to receive those funds. The new law imposed eligibility requirements related to school location and enrollment history, reducing that list to just 18 schools and none of them religious.
Under Act 73, private schools must be in a school district or governing union that does not use a public school for some or all grades, and must have at least 25% of their 2023-24 student body funded by a Vermont public school district, in order to remain eligible for public education dollars.
Jake Reed, a lawyer for the Alliance Defending Freedom, says diverting funding to religious schools violates the 2022 US Supreme Court ruling. Carson v. Makinwhich stated that if states extend public dollars to private schools, they cannot exclude religious ones from that funding. Public dollars flowing to religious schools in Vermont actually increased following that decision, a trend that Act 73 has now reversed.
The state’s stance on tuition limits is different from its approach to alternative school choice programs. While 27 other states have signed up for the tax credit program, Vermont has not officially decided or opted out of full participation, which critics say underscores the state’s broader reluctance to expand access to private schools as it strengthens its own long-standing tuition program.
The law also issued a separate charge against two Vermont parents. Kollene Caspers and Michele Orosz, both of Georgia town, Vermont, filed the lawsuit in March 2026 in Washington County Superior Court, represented by attorney Deborah Bucknam and the Chicago-based Liberty Justice Center. Both parents have children currently enrolled at Rice Memorial High School, a private Catholic school in South Burlington; those students will remain eligible for public tuition upon graduation under the law, but their younger siblings — who are not yet enrolled — will lose that option because the school no longer meets the law’s eligibility criteria.
“There is no rhyme or reason as to which schools and which children remain eligible for education in the city and which ones the Legislature has blocked,” Orosz said in a press release announcing the lawsuit.
Jeffrey Schwab, director of litigation at the Liberty Justice Center, said Act 73 “limits the ability of Vermont families to meet their educational needs and reverses a tradition that goes back two centuries.” Caspers and Orosz’s lawsuit names Vermont Secretary of Education Zoie Saunders as a defendant. Neither the Education Agency nor Vermont Attorney General Charity Clark, who is defending the agency in court, responded to requests for comment.
Act 73 represents a sweeping change in the way Vermont funds and regulates its public schools. Lawmakers are simultaneously working to unify school districts, with a House proposal calling for consolidation of 119 districts into 27 and implementing a new statewide education funding plan aimed at bringing more equity to school funding across the state.
As the appeals challenge continues and two federal cases, Act 73’s tuition restrictions face mounting legal pressure from many quarters, setting up a potential test of how far states can go in reshaping school systems without confronting the religious freedom protections established by the Supreme Court.
