Tessa Bulzan was told she’d be reimbursed for Christian texts, so long as they were educational. Then, the district refused.
A legal battle is unfolding just outside Portland, Oregon, over whether a school district can refuse reimbursements for homeschool curriculum based on its religious influence. Tessa Bulzan, a mother of five young children, is challenging the district’s policy in court.
Bulzan had begun feeling worried about what her oldest daughter was learning at school, which “wasn’t necessarily age appropriate,” and “didn’t really align with our core values and my beliefs,” she told National Review. Around the same time in 2025, she heard about other moms partnering with schools through their homeschooling community.
For the first time, Hillsboro School District was offering $2,000 reimbursements for homeschooling curriculum. “It was like, wow, God, you are so awesome,” Bulzan told NR. She’d been feeling overwhelmed by the financial burden of not working, compounded by the new expenses of homeschooling.
So Bulzan applied for Hillsboro’s “Homeschool Partnership.”
During her introduction to the program, administrators said books from Christian publishers would likely be reimbursed, as long as they were primarily academic, so Bulzan bought books on cursive, poetry, grammar, and more from publishers Abeka and Classical Conversations. But when she submitted her receipts for a reimbursement in January, 2026, her request was abruptly denied.
The administrator in charge of the homeschooling partnership told Bulzan it was because of the curriculum’s biblical views.
“Honestly, it was very disheartening because it had nothing to do with how good the curriculum was,” Bulzan said. “If they would have said, ‘Hey, this is actually not a good book for writing,’ or ‘this is not a good book for grammar,’ that would have been different . . . Not only are they denying me based on the biblical belief, but everything else pales in comparison to the academic rigor of this curriculum.”
Classical Conversations’ cursive lessons, Bulzan explained, were particularly helpful for her oldest daughter, now a second grader, who struggles with dyslexia.
So Bulzan began an extensive appeal process, appealing all the way to the Hillsboro School Board. “At each step, I was told I would not be reimbursed, because of the biblical worldview of the curriculum,” she said.
When Bulzan went to orientation for the homeschool partnership again this fall, program administrators asked parents to sign an agreement saying they’d consent to being kicked out of the program if they tried to reimburse certain curriculum. The program’s website now specifies that parents can be reimbursed only for “approved, non-religious curriculum.”
This fall, administrators “basically wanted [parents] to sign off that they agreed to not reimburse certain curriculum,” Kate Anderson, an attorney representing Bulzan with Alliance Defending Freedom, told National Review. Among the specified non-reimbursable books were texts published by Classical Conversations and Abeka.
From what Bulzan saw, the only banned items listed were Christian. “It didn’t list Buddhist or Hindu texts — it didn’t list anything else except for Christian books and curriculum,” Bulzan said.
Alliance Defending Freedom filed suit in Oregon’s U.S. District Court on behalf of Bulzan last Wednesday, challenging the district’s restriction on faith-based curricula reimbursement as unconstitutional discrimination.
Anderson told NR that the district’s decision to exclude Christian curriculum from reimbursement violated the First and Fourteenth Amendments.
“The heart of the issue here is making sure that the government treats secular curriculum and religious curriculum the same,” Anderson said. “When the government sets out a public benefit program like this and allows public funding to fund homeschooling families, it cannot exclude religious families and their religious curricula, and that is exactly what they’re doing.”
She continued, “When you have a government entity that can pick and choose which curricula is acceptable — and they’re using that freedom to discriminate against religious content — that underscores the underlying problem, which is allowing parents access to public funding for education on equal footing.”
The case is at the very beginning stages of litigation, with Alliance Defending Freedom filing last Wednesday. “We’re still waiting to hear anything from the other side and going through the process of serving them officially with a lawsuit,” Anderson said.