Vermont is barring a Christian school and its students from a state-funded tuition program and athletic league because the school's religious beliefs on gender and sexuality conflict with state policy, according to a federal lawsuit now before a U.S. appeals court.
Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) filed an opening brief June 25 with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit on behalf of Mid Vermont Christian School and one of its families, the Pardington family, arguing that Vermont's exclusion of religious schools from its Town Tuition Program, Dual Enrollment Program, and Early College Program violates the First Amendment.
According to ADF, Vermont, through its Agency of Education and Vermont Principals' Association, requires private religious schools to adopt the state's position on human sexuality and gender — “namely, that sex is mutable and biological differences do not matter” — as a condition of participating in the tuition program and athletic association.
Vermont officials expelled Mid Vermont Christian from state-sponsored athletics in 2023 after the school forfeited a girls' basketball game against a team with a male player, citing its religious beliefs about gender and sexuality. The Vermont Principals' Association later paid $566,000 in damages and attorneys' fees to settle that portion of the case.
"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 David Cortman, ADF senior counsel and 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 in districts without public high schools to attend public or approved private schools of their choice. A state law enacted in 2024, Act 73, imposes conditions that ADF attorneys say result in all religious independent schools being excluded while the majority of secular private schools remain eligible.
The brief argues that "Vermont's history is blemished with discrimination against religious schools and families" and that "religious schools and families spent years seeking constitutional vindication in federal court, only to be banished again by the hostile Vermont legislature."
ADF is asking the 2nd Circuit to "again invalidate Vermont's religious discrimination" and order a preliminary injunction allowing Mid Vermont Christian and the Partington family to participate in the state's public benefit programs.
The 2nd Circuit ruled in 2021 that Vermont's prior exclusion of religious schools from public benefit programs violated the First Amendment. ADF attorneys say Act 73 accomplishes the same result through new means.