Overview:
Act 73 has reduced eligible private schools from 46 to 18, and none accept religious affiliation, prompting a third legal challenge to the state's education reform law
A religious liberty group has escalated its legal battle over Vermont’s sweeping education reform law, taking its case to a federal appeals court this week and arguing that the state’s restrictions on its tuition program unconstitutionally exclude religious schools.
The appeal, brought on behalf of Mid Vermont Christian School in Quechee with support from the Alliance Defending Freedom, is the latest front in a growing legal fight over Act 73, the landmark 2025 law that overhauled Vermont’s two-century-old town tuitioning system. The Christian school first challenged the law in federal court last fall, alleging it discriminated against religious institutions by cutting off their access to public tuition dollars.
Vermont, a state with over 119 districts, has, for more than 200 years, Vermont’s Town Tuitioning Program, which has allowed students in towns without a public high school to use state tuition dollars to attend a school in a neighboring town, public or private. Before Act 73, around 46 private schools were eligible to accept those funds. The new law imposed eligibility requirements tied to school location and enrollment history, narrowing that list to just 18 schools and none of them religious.
Under Act 73, private schools must be located in a school district or supervisory union that does not operate a public school for some or all grades, and must have had at least 25% of their 2023-24 student body funded by a Vermont public school district, in order to remain eligible for public tuition dollars.
Jake Reed, an attorney with the Alliance Defending Freedom, argues that diverting funding away from religious schools violates the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling in Carson v. Makin, which held 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 had in fact increased following that decision, a trend Act 73 has now reversed.
The state’s posture on tuition restrictions stands in contrast to its approach on a separate federal school-choice initiative. While 27 other states had signed up for the federall tax credit program, Vermont remained officially undecided or opted out of full participation, a distinction critics say underscores the state’s broader reluctance to expand private school access even as it tightens its own longstanding tuitioning system.
The law has also drawn a separate lawsuit from two Vermont parents. Kollene Caspers and Michele Orosz, both of the town of Georgia, Vermont, filed suit 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 through graduation under a grandfather clause, but their younger siblings — not yet enrolled — will lose that option because the school no longer meets the law’s eligibility criteria.
“There is no rhyme or reason to which schools and which kids get to stay eligible for town tuitioning and which ones the Legislature blocked,” Orosz said in a press release announcing the lawsuit.
Jeffrey Schwab, the Liberty Justice Center’s director of litigation, said Act 73 “limits the ability of Vermont families to meet their educational need and rescinds a tradition that goes back two centuries.” The Caspers and Orosz lawsuit names Vermont Education Secretary Zoie Saunders as a defendant. Neither the Agency of Education nor Vermont Attorney General Charity Clark, who defends the agency in court, responded to requests for comment.
Act 73 represents a broader transformation of how Vermont funds and governs its public schools. Lawmakers are simultaneously working to consolidate school districts, with a House proposal calling for combining 119 districts into 27 and implementing a new statewide education finance system intended to bring more equity to school funding across the state.
With the federal appellate challenge now underway alongside two state-level lawsuits, Act 73’s tuition restrictions face mounting legal pressure on multiple fronts, setting up a potential test of how far states can go in reshaping school choice programs without running afoul of religious-liberty protections established by the Supreme Court.
