Trys vieno kambario amišų mokyklos jau yra skolingos Niujorkui 118 000 dolerių už tai, kad leido nevakcinuotiems vaikams lankyti pamokas. Atviras ginčas kyla ne dėl šio įstatymo projekto. Jis susijęs su tuo, ar valstija gali nustatyti papildomą 2 000 dolerių mokestį už kiekvieną vaiką, ev...
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Three one-room Amish schools already owe New York $118,000 for letting unvaccinated children sit in class. The open fight is not that bill. It is whether the state can add another $2,000 per child, every school day, until a farm community vaccinates, closes, or leaves.
On October 5, 2026, Governor Kathy Hochul signed Executive Order No. 65 and called a statewide disaster emergency over measles. The order runs to November 4. As of October 3, New York had 108 measles cases this year, 92 of them since July 15 in under-vaccinated rural communities across 18 counties. Next door, Pennsylvania had 977 cases and five deaths as of October 2, the order says. That emergency is real. So is the older bill on three private Amish schools. They are not the same paper, and mixing them is how this story gets bent.
The bill that already exists
The schools are Dygert Road, Pleasant View (also called Twin Mountain), and Shady Lane. They sit in Amish settlements around Clymer, Heuvelton, and Canajoharie. They take no state or federal school money. The children in the rooms are Amish children. That is the point of the schools.
After a hearing on May 2, 2022, an administrative judge recommended no money fine. One reason: notice had gone out online to families who do not live online. On December 15, 2022, then Health Commissioner Mary T. Bassett set that advice aside. She wrote that the schools knew the law and would not comply because of what she called an irreconcilable clash with their beliefs. She imposed the full amounts: $52,000 on Dygert Road for 26 children, $46,000 on Pleasant View for 23, and $20,000 on Shady Lane for 10. That is 59 children and $118,000.
Counsel for the families, Aaron Siri, told the New York Post in August 2026 that the community could pay a judgment of that size only if the state took land.
Planet Today walked through the same numbers on October 4: Amish Schools Face $118,000 Fines as Vaccine Case Returns to Court.
The daily meter is a legal reading, not a second bill
Headlines that say New York is charging $2,000 for every healthy unvaccinated child, every day, are half right. The half that is right sits in a footnote.
Public Health Law section 2164 says a child in any public, private, or church school must show proof of the required shots after a short grace period. A doctor may excuse a child if a shot would be medically harmful. A parent may not excuse a child for faith. Each violation can draw a civil fine of up to $2,000.
Footnote 9 of the Second Circuit opinion, quoted in the families’ September 2026 petition, records New York’s view: each day each unvaccinated student attends is a separate violation and a separate fine of up to $2,000. Do the arithmetic the headlines do. Fifty-nine children times $2,000 is $118,000. Times a 180-day school year is $21,240,000. That figure is a projection of the state’s reading of the statute. It is not a bill already mailed. No public record shows the health department stacking a fresh $118,000 for each day since 2022. Readers should hold both facts at once. The lever exists. It has not yet been pulled at that speed.
That gap is the part many outlets skip. A dramatic desk prints the ceiling. A state desk prints the $118,000 and calls the rest alarm. The court file contains both.
How a fifty-year opt-out ended
From 1966 until June 13, 2019, New York let a parent claim a “genuine and sincere religious belief” against school shots. In the 2017–18 school year, the health department counted 26,217 students using that opt-out in schools and child-care programs.
The repeal was driven by measles that began in 2018 in Rockland County’s Orthodox Jewish community and spread in parts of Brooklyn. The state later counted 312 confirmed cases, the largest New York outbreak since 1992. Lawmakers said religious opt-outs had grown 54 percent statewide and that vaccination rates in more than 280 schools had fallen below 85 percent. They pointed to California, which had dropped its religious exemption after its own measles outbreak.
The floor talk was not soft. Assembly sponsor Jeffrey Dinowitz called religious objections “utter garbage” and said he knew of nothing in the Torah, the Bible, or the Koran against vaccination. Senator James Skoufis, a co-sponsor, later described the exemptions as fake in the political fight around the bill. Governor Andrew Cuomo signed the repeal the day it passed. New York joined a small group of states with no religious exemption for school shots. The families’ petition says 45 states and the District of Columbia still allow one.
Here is the line the 2019 debate rarely drew. The outbreak that killed the exemption was clustered in Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods near New York City. The petition says the state has not shown that any of those cases occurred in the Amish settlements now under fine. The same statute, written for that outbreak, now sits on one-room schools that take no public money and sit on private farms. A law can be general on its face and still land hardest on the smallest group that will not bend.
The court path, twice
Joseph Miller, Jonas Smucker, Ezra Wengerd, and the three schools sued in 2023. Wengerd is an elected representative of Amish schools in the state. They argued free exercise of religion and the parental right recognized in Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972), the case that let Amish families end formal schooling after eighth grade.
They lost in federal district court. The Second Circuit affirmed in March 2025. The Supreme Court then wiped that ruling and sent the case back to be read again in light of Mahmoud v. Taylor (2025), which sided with parents who did not want young children in lessons that cut against their faith. On June 30, 2026, Judges José A. Cabranes, Richard C. Wesley, and Eunice C. Lee affirmed again. The case name is Miller v. McDonald. James V. McDonald is the current health commissioner.
The appeals court said the shot rule is neutral and applies to every schoolchild without a medical excuse. It does not, in the judges’ view, tell a child what to believe. It conditions school attendance on a health step. Under Employment Division v. Smith (1990), a neutral general law needs only a rational public-health reason, not the harder test used when a law targets faith. The judges said Mahmoud did not change that, because a shot is not a lesson.
The families say that reading misses the point of their life. Their schools are not a service they buy from the state. They are how the community keeps its children. Close the school, or fine it until the land is gone, and the faith is not practiced in New York. Hiram Sasser of First Liberty Institute put it this way: if New York wins, the Amish may be forced to leave a state where they have lived since the 1830s. Lawyers for the families say a community of about 25,000, the fifth-largest Amish population in the country, could move to Pennsylvania.
On September 28–29, 2026, they filed a new petition, No. 26-438. First Liberty, with Siri & Glimstad and others, asked the high court to take the case again. A Reason report on October 8 said the Court has until about November 2 to decide whether to hear it. Planet Today covered the June loss here: Amish Families Lose Vaccine Exemption Case.
What the families wrote by hand
Amish parents sent handwritten letters to the court. One reads: “Our Almighty God wants us to fully put our faith and trust in Him which is in conflict to put our trust in vaccines.” Another line they lean on is the command not to be conformed to this world.
Aaron Siri, managing partner at Siri & Glimstad, said the community “wants to be left alone to live out their faith just like they have for nearly 200 years.”
That is not a campaign line inside the settlement. Old Order practice keeps a distance from outside systems: short formal schooling, no public school money, church rules on tools, mutual aid instead of insurance. Vaccination is not refused by every Amish parent in America. Ohio surveys have found many parents accepting some shots. Positions differ by church district. In these three New York schools, the parents in the case say the conflict is religious.
The petition also says New York has left as many as 100,000 non-compliant students in public schools, by the state’s own estimates, while bringing the full fine down on a few dozen Amish children. If that number holds, the enforcement picture is not “the law falls on everyone the same.” It is “the law is available against everyone, and it was used here.”
What the state says, and what this week changed
New York’s filing says the repeal was meant to raise vaccination rates and keep community protection against measles. Measles spreads in the air. It can cause pneumonia, brain swelling, deafness, and death. Before the shot, it was a routine killer of children. The state says a medical excuse remains, so the law is not a total ban on opt-outs.
Hochul’s October 5 order does not itself raise the school fines. It widens who may give the measles-mumps-rubella shot — paramedics, advanced emergency crews, midwives, pharmacists — and lets nurses order tests. It requires shot records to be reported to the state registry within 72 hours. Hochul said no one should get seriously ill or die from a disease a shot can prevent.
The rural tilt is not in dispute. The order says the 92 newer cases are in under-immunized rural communities. Yates County, home to a large Amish and Mennonite population, has ZIP codes where the share of two-year-olds with at least one measles shot by age two was about 50 to 53 percent in state registry data referenced to January 1, 2026. Other ZIP codes in the same county sat in the 70s and 80s. Low coverage is a fact on the map. Whether a one-room school on a private lane is the right place to swing a $2,000-a-day club is a different question.
Pennsylvania’s outbreak makes the state’s fear concrete. Five deaths and nearly a thousand cases, many in plain communities, are why health officers talk about rural spread into New York. Planet Today reported the first two of those deaths in August: Two Measles Deaths in Pennsylvania Mark First US Fatalities of 2026. A New York Times dispatch on October 4 found Amish families in Ohio and Pennsylvania who had never seen measles, got it, and in some cases rethought the shot after children fell ill. That report cuts against the cartoon of a bloc that will never change. It also cuts against the cartoon of a state that only cares about city outbreaks.
The autism question the court file does not ask
Some versions of this story put a heading over the Amish case: why don’t Amish children have autism? The court papers do not ask that. The fine is not about autism. Still, readers ask, so the record on that claim should be stated plainly.
A 2005 news essay by Dan Olmsted walked Lancaster County and said he could find almost no autism. It was not a study. A 2010 screening paper, looking at an Indiana settlement and Holmes County, Ohio, estimated about 1 in 271 Amish children on the autism spectrum, lower than the U.S. rate then (about 1 in 91). The authors said the gap could be real, or it could be how caregivers answer questions, or genetic differences. Amish children often leave school after eighth grade, so they are not watched by the same school teams that flag cases elsewhere.
Vaccination inside Amish settlements is not zero. A 2011 Pediatrics survey of Amish parents in Ohio found most had given at least some shots; only a minority refused all of them, and the stated reason was often fear of side effects, not a church rule. A later Ohio survey found still higher partial uptake. The National Academies have said vaccines do not cause autism, and large comparison studies have not found a higher autism rate in vaccinated children than in unvaccinated children.
So the viral line — no shots, no autism, case closed — does not survive contact with the papers. A lower counted rate in some plain communities is a real finding, with a short list of competing explanations, none of them settled by the New York school case. Using that heading to explain a $118,000 fine mixes two arguments that do not share a docket.
What each side leaves in the margin
The state side often skips the size of the tool. A $2,000-a-day reading, on a school that cannot pass the cost to taxpayers, is a close-or-leave notice, not a reminder. The 2019 speakers who called religious objections garbage were plain about it. And the outbreak used to justify the repeal was not an Amish outbreak.
The family side often skips the disease. Measles in 2026 is not a theory. Pennsylvania has deaths. New York has 108 cases and an emergency order signed this week. Coverage near 50 percent in some ZIP codes will spread a virus that travels in the air. “Leave us alone” does not stop it at a fence.
A third omission sits between them. Medical exemptions remain. Religious ones do not. A child with a doctor’s letter can attend. A child whose parents will not sign the shot card cannot. For a group whose objection is written as trust in God rather than in medicine, that split is the whole case. The Second Circuit called it neutral. The families call it a ban on their schools. Both descriptions fit the same statute.
What happens next
If the Supreme Court refuses the case, the June 30 ruling stands. The $118,000 order stands. The per-day reading remains on the shelf for the health department. The schools can vaccinate, close, or keep teaching and risk new fines. Sasser’s warning — leave New York — is a lawyer’s forecast, not a bus schedule, but the community has moved for less.
If the Court takes the case, it will have to say whether a state can still close a religious school over a shot rule after Mahmoud told schools to respect parents who opt out of lessons. That answer would reach past three rooms in upstate New York.
Until then the arithmetic is simple and the politics are not. Fifty-nine children. Two thousand dollars each, already billed. A statute the state reads as renewable every morning. A measles emergency in rural New York and next door. A faith that measures obedience by separation. None of those sentences cancels the others.
Sources
- Governor Kathy Hochul, Executive Order No. 65, October 5, 2026: Declaring a Disaster Emergency due to measles. News release: governor.ny.gov.
- First Liberty Institute, September 29, 2026: New York Amish again ask the Supreme Court. Petition PDF: Miller petition.
- Supreme Court docket report, No. 26-438: Joseph Miller v. James V. McDonald.
- Second Circuit opinion, Miller v. McDonald, No. 24-681, June 30, 2026: opinion PDF.
- Fine breakdown and hearing history: Juicy Ecumenism, September 10, 2026.
- Reason, October 8, 2026: New York is fining Amish schools.
- 2019 repeal: New York Times, June 13, 2019; Senator Skoufis press release.
- Yates County MMR coverage by ZIP, data as of January 1, 2026: New York State Health Department PDF.
- Related Planet Today pieces: Amish children and the 2025 ruling; hospital shot rules and exemptions.
Original source
The prompt text matches a piece published October 8, 2026, by The People’s Voice: “New York Declares War on the Amish—$2,000 Fines for Every Healthy Unvaccinated Child, Every Day.” A plainer account of the same docket ran on Planet Today on October 4, 2026: Amish Schools Face $118,000 Fines as Vaccine Case Returns to Court.
Note for readers and fact-checkers
The People’s Voice is an opinion site with a long record of dramatic headlines. It is not a primary source. The fine amounts, school names, case caption, June 30, 2026 appeals ruling, September 2026 petition, and the October 5 measles order are checked here against the Second Circuit opinion, the First Liberty petition, and the governor’s executive order. The $21 million figure is arithmetic on the state’s per-day reading of the statute, not an invoice already issued. Autism claims do not appear in the court record and are not used here as proof of anything about these schools.