(MONTPELIER, Vt.)—The Liberty Justice Center filed a lawsuit challenging Vermont’s recently enacted Act 73, a 2025 law that drastically restricts the state’s historic town tuitioning system and unlawfully limits families’ educational options, including access to religiously affiliated independent schools.
For more than two centuries, Vermont’s town tuitioning program has enabled students in communities without certain grade-level public schools (often rural, small, or geographically remote) to attend approved independent schools with publicly funded tuition. Act 73 marks a sharp departure from that tradition.
The law amends 16 V.S.A. § 828 to:
- Prohibit tuition vouchers from being used at any school created after July 1, 2025;
- Confine eligibility to schools within specific supervisory structures tied to whether a district operated a public school as of July 1, 2024;
- Require that at least 25% of a school’s 2023–24 enrollment consisted of district-funded tuition students; and
- Impose class-size minimums with only a narrow and discretionary waiver.
These criteria arbitrarily exclude independent schools situated near public schools, even when those public schools are not viable options for individual students, and schools that serve families who do not primarily rely on tuitioning. As a result, the law denies tuitioning benefits to similarly situated families based on factors unrelated to educational need or opportunity.
“Act 73 puts special interests over the interests of children,” said Jeffrey Schwab, Director of Litigation at the Liberty Justice Center. “This law limits the ability of Vermont families to meet their educational need and rescinds a tradition that goes back two centuries. Doing so violates the Vermont Constitution.”
The Liberty Justice Center, together with local counsel, represents two Georgia, Vermont parents Kollene Caspers and Michele Orosz, after Act 73 stripped tuitioning eligibility to attend their desired schools from some of their children.
“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,” said Michele Orosz, who’s younger children have been denied tuitioning eligibility. “Our city doesn’t have a public high school—the State will be paying town tuitioning regardless. There is no reason to block my younger kids from getting the same opportunity as my eldest.”
Caspers v. State of Vermont was filed in Vermont Superior Court, Civil Division, and the filings can be found here.