Tessa Bulzan, a Marine Corps veteran, was working a six-figure job when an incident at her children’s school led her to leave that job to homeschool her children. The incident had deeply conflicted with her Christian beliefs, and she was determined to teach her children from a Biblical perspective. Never did she expect to encounter another barrier to providing her children a Christian education.
In July 2025, she joined Oregon’s Hillsboro School District Homeschool Partnership Program. At first, when she applied for the allowable reimbursement for qualifying curriculum, supplies and educational activities, the district approved her Christian-based curriculum from Abeka and Classical Conversations. But then they denied the reimbursement months later, on grounds there were “incidental Scripture” and “references to God,” Bulzan told CBN News.
Bulzan appealed the denial and instead purchased books of different worldviews to test whether the district would approve of materials that weren’t exclusively Christian.
“One was Julian is a Mermaid, and the other is We Are Water Protectors, and they approved both of those,” Bulzan said. “And neither of those meet the core academics that my books did. Just like math, we’re talking two plus two equals four, but we were denied solely on the basis that it was Christian material.”
Bluzan went on to say that she wants “Christian families, and families of any religious nature that want to bring up their children in a way that they believe, that they have the ability to” and wants “creators of Christian curriculum to be able to sell their curriculum without having to find workarounds so that it can be funded within the school district.”
Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) is representing her in a federal lawsuit against the Hillsboro school district.
Kate Anderson, the ADF attorney representing Bulzan, said denial was “simply that it came from a religious Biblical perspective, which is why this case violates the Constitution.”
“The school district indicated that the curriculum met all of the state standards, that it could be used in the program, and even afterwards in the appeal, there was no question as to the academic rigor of the program,” Anderson said.
Anderson explained further that when a government offers a public benefit program, it “cannot exclude religious people or religious content on that basis alone.”
“When people are otherwise eligible for the program, it’s religious discrimination that violates the Free Exercise Clause to exclude them. And that’s what happened,” she said.
