When the girls’ basketball team at Mid Vermont Christian School refused to play against a transgender-identified male in 2023, Vermont forced the entire school out of the state’s athletic league. After a hard-fought legal battle, Mid Vermont won a $566,000 settlement in April for damages and attorneys’ fees from the Vermont Principals Association, and is now back in the state sports league.
But the fight is not over.
“The lawsuit really has two components,” Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) Senior Counsel Ryan Tucker, who represents Mid Vermont Christian School, told IW Features.
The first component of the school’s lawsuit involves the state sports league, which Mid Vermont won, Tucker explained. The second, ongoing component is the school’s fight against Vermont’s targeting of religious schools across the state by excluding them from its state tuition program.
The legal battle began when the state banned the “the entire school from the state sports programs and also academic competition” after the girls’ basketball team would not play against a trans-identified male competitor, Tucker said. This affected not only the girls’ basketball team, but all sports teams at the school, as well as students wishing to participate in quiz bowl and the spelling bee.
“Not only were these poor girls deprived [of] that opportunity, everybody that was playing sports was denied that opportunity at Mid-Vermont,” Tucker said.
The school joined a Christian sports league instead, but had to travel much farther to games as a result, sometimes even across state lines, just to play against schools they had no historical ties with.
“It was damaging to the school, not just financially, but also to the individuals and adults that had to accompany them on these trips,” Tucker added. “There were instances where [students] weren’t able to be present at school or be able to study.”
Even public school students in the area were impacted via a member-to-member program some schools offer, Tucker said. This program allows students at smaller schools with limited sports to play on another school’s team for their desired sport. However, those public school students on Mid Vermont’s teams were suddenly unable to play in state-sponsored sports.
When Mid Vermont first challenged the state athletic association’s decision, the district court denied Mid Vermont’s request for relief, Tucker said. Then, after an appeal, the United States Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit handed the school its victory and ordered them back into the state-sponsored league.
Now, ADF and Mid Vermont are fighting the second half of the battle for religious freedom in Vermont’s education system.
“The second piece of this lawsuit involves what’s called the town tuition program,” Tucker said. “In Vermont, like some states in the Northeast, there are areas… so rural that they don’t have public high schools.”
For students in these areas, the state provides funding for students to attend a private school. For years, Vermont barred schools that didn’t adhere to radical gender ideology from this program, discriminating against religious schools’ Christian beliefs around sex and gender. But after a series of lawsuits filed by Alliance Defending Freedom, the 2nd Circuit ordered Vermont to stop excluding religious schools.
In response, Vermont quickly enacted Act 73 to change which schools were eligible to participate in the program. The new requirements included geography and class-size restrictions, as well as a percentage-based restriction that required 25% of the student body to have been a participant in the state tuition program in the last year.
“The problem is that when a school is not participating in a program and literally only has one year to do so, any sort of 25% exclusion is going to necessarily knock them out of the program,” Tucker explained.
The new law was designed to specifically exclude religious schools, Tucker said. In fact, he explained that every religious school in the state is now excluded from the tuition program and called it a “religious gerrymander.” He added that several lawmakers did not even pretend the law had other pretenses, and that they made hostile comments about the beliefs of the religious schools.
And while those same lawmakers may parrot talking points about a supposed separation of church and state, Tucker said “the law is very clear” on the illegality of discriminating against religious institutions.
“The United States Supreme Court… has made very clear that you can’t exclude a religious school or religious folks from a public benefit simply because they’re religious or do religious things with those dollars,” he said. “The fact that Vermont officials are simply ignoring it is insane.”
ADF is currently briefing the issue before the 2nd Circuit of Appeals after a district court judge denied Mid Vermont’s request to be allowed back into the tuition program. This fall, ADF expects to argue the case before the 2nd Circuit.
“No child should have fewer… educational opportunities due to their religious beliefs,” Tucker said.
