Some may think school choice is a new idea. Not so. In fact, the
nation’s first voucher program began back in 1869 in the state
of Vermont. Former U.S. President Calvin Coolidge attended an
exceptional example of one of the state’s “voucher schools.”
Amity Shlaes of the George W. Bush Institute, syndicated
columnist, and author of bestsellers, The Forgotten Man and
Coolidge, wrote in The Wall Street Journal back in 1998 of
Coolidge’s school, St. Johnsbury Academy: Lodged securely
between mountains in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, stands a
school as old and traditional as most any in the nation. Its
boys don button-down broadcloth and ties for morning chapel. Its
girls recite Virgil in the same halls where a young Calvin
Coolidge, class of 1891, absorbed his Latin. Yet this school,
the St. Johnsbury Academy, is also a voucher school and has been
one for well over a century. Indeed, it is a thriving voucher
school: This decade, the academy marked its sesquicentennial by
expanding its student body to 1,000 from 7