Salt Lake City, Ut.—This afternoon, the Third Judicial District Court in Salt Lake County ruled that the Utah Fits All Scholarship program, enacted in 2023 to give thousands of Utah families greater school choice, is unconstitutional under the Utah Constitution. Maria Ruiz and Tiffany Brown, two Utah parents who rely on the scholarship program to send their children to schools that meet their needs, intervened to defend the program, and immediately announced that they will appeal the decision to the Utah Supreme Court.

They partnered with the Partnership for Educational Choice—a joint project of the Institute for Justice and EdChoice—to defend the program from a constitutional challenge levied against it by Utah’s teachers’ union.

“Today’s ruling ignores the text of the Utah Constitution and treats Utah children as mere conduits for channeling money into public school district budgets,” said IJ Senior Attorney Arif Panju. “Nothing in the Utah Constitution prohibits the Legislature from creating scholarship programs for Utah children. We will immediately appeal to the Utah Supreme Court.”

The Utah Fits All Scholarship program offers a lifeline to families that would like to leave public schools that do not meet their children’s needs. Under the ESA program, qualifying students will receive a scholarship up to $8,000 for a wide array of educational expenses, including tuition, textbooks, and tutoring services. The scholarship program has proven enormously popular. More than 27,000 Utah families applied for the 10,000 accounts available in the first year of the program, demonstrating the overwhelming demand for educational choice that empowers students over systems.

The lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the Utah Fits All Scholarship program lacks merit, and it would permanently deprive thousands of Utah families of the educational options that they have planned for their children in 2024-25 and into the future. That’s why Maria and Tiffany, along with the Partnership for Educational Choice, will fight to protect the program in the Utah Supreme Court for all Utah families