Vermont state education authorities agreed to pay Mid Vermont Christian School more than $566,000 in damages and legal fees after banning the small school from all sports and academic competitions for two years, a punishment that began when its girls' basketball team forfeited a postseason game rather than compete against a biological male, Fox News Digital reported.

The settlement, finalized Tuesday following mediation, closes one chapter of a legal fight that exposed how far state officials were willing to go to punish a 111-student religious school for holding a position shared by most Americans: that boys and girls are different, and girls' sports should be for girls.

The Vermont Principals' Association didn't just strip Mid Vermont Christian of basketball. It banned the school from every state-sanctioned athletic competition, and then extended the punishment to science fairs and spelling bees. The message was clear: comply with the state's gender ideology, or lose access to public life.

How a single forfeit became a two-year exile

The trouble started early in the 2023 school year. Mid Vermont Christian's girls' basketball team was set to face an opponent in the postseason whose roster included a transgender athlete, a biological male. The school decided to withdraw rather than force its players onto the court under those conditions.

Chris Goodwin, the girls' basketball coach, described the decision as painful but clear-eyed. He told Fox News Digital:

"We were all in agreement that the right decision was to not compromise our beliefs and to withdraw, but the conversation with the players was the hardest. Because you play a 20-game season, and you put in the work and the expectation is that you enter the postseason tournament with a shot to see how you're going to do and to see how far you can get. So there were some teary eyes, and some sad faces, but in the end, they all really did understand that it was the right thing to do."

The state's response came fast. Within days, the Vermont Principals' Association dropped the hammer, not a one-game suspension, not a season-long probation, but a blanket ban from all competition.

Goodwin recalled the scope of it with visible frustration. "We were going to be banned from all athletic competition in the state... and then on top of that... science fairs and spelling bees," he said.

The cost of standing firm

For a school of roughly 111 students, the ban didn't just affect the basketball program. It gutted the extracurricular life that holds a small school community together.

To keep competing at all, Mid Vermont Christian had to send its teams out of state. Travel tripled, Goodwin said. Students returned from away competitions at ten o'clock at night, trying to finish homework on the ride home. Home games, the kind where parents and neighbors fill the bleachers, vanished entirely.

Goodwin put it simply: "That's a big part of the culture... having games in your gym, where parents and community members come. That just disappeared."

The lost years stung most for the players who aged out of eligibility while the ban held. Goodwin said the school had "some really good teams during those two years where we would have been, if not winning the state championship, competing for the state championship." Those seasons are gone. No appeal, no replay, no remedy covers that.

The broader fight over transgender athletes in girls' sports continues to play out in courtrooms and statehouses across the country. The Trump DOJ recently filed a Title IX lawsuit against Minnesota over its policy allowing biological males on girls' sports teams, signaling that the federal government is now engaged on the same question Vermont tried to settle by punishing a Christian school.

The courts step in

Mid Vermont Christian, represented by Alliance Defending Freedom, took the fight to federal court. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit sided with the school, and the language of the ruling left little doubt about how the judges viewed Vermont's conduct.

The appeals court described the ban as "unprecedented, overbroad, and procedurally irregular," AP News reported. The court granted a preliminary injunction ordering the school reinstated to the Vermont Principals' Association, finding that the school was likely to prevail on its claim that state officials acted with hostility toward its religious beliefs.

The court wrote that "the VPA may not impose discipline based on its view that Mid Vermont's religious objection was 'wrong.'" That line alone should have been a wake-up call for every state official involved.

In September 2025, the appeals court formally ruled that Mid Vermont Christian must be allowed to participate in state athletics and returned the case to district court for further proceedings. The school's teams were back in competition. This season, Goodwin finally led his squad back onto the floor at Barre Auditorium for the state tournament.

The emotional weight of the return was captured in a moment Goodwin described. When the team won its quarterfinal game to reach the tournament, a senior captain who had graduated, and never got her own chance, called her younger sister, a current player. Both were in tears.

"Number one because of the joy of achieving a goal that they wanted to achieve, but also the sadness of her sister, who's a freshman in college now, not having that opportunity. That's the hardest part to see the sadness that these girls have to experience. Because the state decided to make the decision it just, it was hurtful and it's bittersweet that we're back in, but we are glad we're back in."

The settlement, and what it reveals

The Vermont Principals' Association agreed to pay $566,000 in damages and attorney's fees to settle the claims. That money comes from an organization funded, directly or indirectly, by the state's education system, which means Vermont taxpayers are footing the bill for their own officials' overreach.

ADF Senior Counsel David Cortman framed the case in terms the state apparently never considered. "For more than two years, state officials denied Mid Vermont Christian School a public benefit available to all other schools in Vermont just because it stood by the widely held, biblical belief that boys and girls are different," he said.

Cortman also expressed disbelief at how aggressively the state fought the case. "It's been surprising how much the state has dug in their heels," he told Fox News Digital. "The arguments they've made... even saying your beliefs are wrong."

He recalled a particularly telling moment in court. "In one of the hearings before the court, the state argued that the school was on the wrong side of history," Cortman said. The state's lawyers, in other words, weren't content to argue procedure or jurisdiction. They wanted to tell a religious school that its theology was outdated.

Courts across the country are grappling with similar clashes between government policy and individual rights. A recent Montana Supreme Court ruling sided with the ACLU to block the state from requiring identification documents to match biological sex, another front in the same legal and cultural conflict.

Cortman offered a sharp rebuttal to the state's "wrong side of history" claim: "The school is on the right side of history and will be for following his faith in its beliefs, for doing what's right... sometimes there's a price to pay. But it's always the right thing to do. You're always on the right side of history when you stand up for truth."

The broader litigation continues

The $566,000 settlement resolves the claims against the Vermont Principals' Association, but the broader case is not over. Related litigation against other Vermont officials continues, with the case returned to district court following the Second Circuit's ruling. Fox News Digital reached out to the Vermont Principals' Association and the Vermont State Board of Education for comment but did not report receiving a response.

Coach Goodwin, meanwhile, summed up his own view of the situation with the directness of someone who spent two years driving his players across state lines just so they could compete. "As a coach, I always want my team to play in fair and safe competitions," he said.

That's all Mid Vermont Christian ever asked for, fair competition and the freedom to hold its beliefs without being driven from public life. Vermont's education establishment spent two years and more than half a million dollars in taxpayer-funded damages proving it couldn't tolerate either one.

When the state has to write a six-figure check because a federal appeals court called its conduct hostile, overbroad, and irregular, the lesson isn't complicated. The people who imposed the ban were the ones on the wrong side, not of history, but of the Constitution.