SOUTH BURLINGTON (VT)
VTDigger [Montpelier VT]
August 25, 2026
By Kevin O'Connor
The state’s largest religious denomination, now in bankruptcy court, wants to save the school in South Burlington from potential liquidation by privately offering it for $4.3 million — 14% of the campus’s $30.5 million appraised value.
Creditors in the Vermont Roman Catholic Diocese’s Chapter 11 financial reorganization case are fighting a church plan to sell Rice Memorial High School to supporters to protect the grade 9-12 South Burlington campus from potential liquidation.
In a U.S. Bankruptcy Court filing Monday, lawyers for a creditors’ committee that represents more than 100 clergy abuse claimants questioned the proposed $4.3 million price tag for Rice’s 42-classroom building and 27 acres of athletic fields, parking areas and wetlands. The figure is only 14% of the $30.5 million value reported in a recent church-commissioned appraisal.
“The proposed sale is a functional insider transaction,” the claimants’ counsel wrote in the filing. “The diocese did not list the property. It did not retain a broker. It did not solicit a single competing offer. It contractually promised the buyer that it would not do so. And it now asks the court to bless the result as ‘the highest and best offer,’ a characterization that is true only in the trivial sense that it is the sole offer the diocese permitted itself to receive.”
The creditors’ committee wants the court to limit any sale to a public offering in hopes of raising more money for clergy abuse settlements.
“If the purchaser’s offer is truly the best available, a competitive process will confirm it and the purchaser will prevail,” attorneys wrote. “If it is not, the (diocese), and the over 100 survivors of childhood sexual abuse who are the principal creditors in this case, will have been spared a substantial and irreversible loss.”
Judge Heather Cooper is scheduled to consider the issue at a hearing in Burlington on Sept. 1.
The creditors’ filing comes a month after the state’s largest religious denomination asked the court to approve a private sale of the 400-student campus to a nonprofit entity of supporters identifying themselves only as RMHS Inc.