ARLINGTON, Va.—Today, the Partnership for Educational Choice (“Partnership”)—a joint project of the Institute for Justice (IJ) and EdChoice—announced its intention to intervene in and defend against a newly filed lawsuit attacking the Utah Fits All Scholarship (UFAS) program. The Partnership intends to represent families participating in the program against the legal challenge, which was filed yesterday by the Utah Education Association and a member of the Utah State Board of Education.

“The Utah Fits All scholarship program empowers parents to choose the education that will work best for their children,” said IJ Managing Attorney Arif Panju. “The Utah Education Association is trying to deny Utah families that opportunity in order to protect the monopoly on education that it currently enjoys. The union and its allies will not succeed in depriving families of the desperately needed alternatives that Utah Fits All provides.”

“All Utah students deserve the opportunity for a quality education,” said Thomas M. Fisher, EdChoice vice president and director of litigation. “Utah was right to prioritize student needs over a state monopoly, and we will eagerly defend its decision to empower families.”

The UFAS program provides education savings accounts, worth up to $8,000, that families can use on a wide variety of educational expenses for their children. More than 27,000 students applied for the 10,000 accounts available in the first year of the program, demonstrating the overwhelming demand that Utah families have for alternatives to the public school system.

The Partnership for Educational Choice, which launched in late 2023, is a project of IJ and EdChoice. For more than three decades, IJ has been the nation’s leading law firm defending educational choice programs and expanding educational access and opportunity. Since its founding in 1991, it has successfully represented parents in educational choice lawsuits in numerous state supreme courts, intermediate courts of appeal, and trial courts, as well as four times at the U.S. Supreme Court (Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, Arizona Christian School Tuition Organization v. Winn, Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, Carson v. Makin). During that time, EdChoice has been the premier organization providing critical research and educational information to stakeholders working to expand educational choice throughout the country. In late 2023, it added a litigation arm, EdChoice Legal Advocates, to its portfolio.

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To arrange interviews on this subject, journalists may contact Phillip Suderman, IJ’s Communications Project Manager at [email protected] (850) 376-4110. More information on the case is available at: https://ij.org/issues/school-choice/