Property tax exemption to private nonprofit secondary “public” school.

Mountain View Community School, Inc. v. City of Rutland, 2011 VT 65 (Burgess, J.)   

Mountain View Community School, Inc. appeals from a trial  court order rejecting its request for a property tax exemption for “lands owned or leased by colleges, academies or other public schools” under 32 V.S.A. § 3802(4).  Mountain View contends the court misinterpreted the law in denying the requested exemption.  We agree and reverse.

The trial court mistakenly conflated the “public use” and “public school” exemptions. While the school claimed exemption as a “college, academy, or other public school” under 32 V.S.A. § 3802(4), the City  asserted that Mountain View failed to meet the test for determining whether property is dedicated to a “public use” under the separate provision of § 3802(4) exempting real estate “sequestered or used for public, pious or charitable uses.”  The “various clauses of § 3802(4) are disjunctive, not conjunctive,” and Mountain View was not required to satisfy the criteria for the “public, pious or charitable” use exemption in seeking an exemption for land owned by a “college, academy or other public school.”

Although cited by neither the parties nor the trial court below, our decision in   Willard v. Pike, 59 Vt. 202, 9 A. 907 (1886), nearly 125 years ago, remains the seminal and controlling authority governing the exemption for property “owned or leased by colleges, academies or other public schools.”  In Willard the court held St. Johnsbury Academy qualifies as a public school within the meaning of the statutory exemption. The court reasoned  that   “public” in the phrase “public school” was not limited to the sense of being open to all students at public expense, but includes non-profit tuition-based schools that are “public”  in the same sense in which nonprofit colleges and academies are “public.”  The court has  in the last 125 years applied this broad definition of a public school to a variety of selective, nonprofit private schools, if the specific property in question was actually used for educational purposes.  Mountain view easly meets this test.

Reversed.