Education Savings Account Act
ALEC’s template education savings account statute, adopted July 20, 2017 and amended September 9, 2017 by its Education and Workforce Development Task Force. The successor design to the voucher model: the money goes to an account the parent spends across a list of approved uses rather than to a school as tuition. Not law in Ohio. verified
model-policy/education-savings-account-act · 1 node point here
The provision worth having on the record is the one about enrollment counts. The model subtracts the award “from the state school aid payable to the student’s resident school district” — and then provides that the participating student “shall be counted in the enrollment figures for his or her resident school district”. verified ALEC model text
Those two clauses together describe a district that keeps the student in its count while losing the money attached to them. That is close to the mechanism Ohio districts identify as the core of their complaint about the original EdChoice design, where a district could lose funding for a student it had never educated — and in the model it is deliberate drafting rather than an artifact. What the model gains by it is a denominator that does not collapse when participation rises; what a district loses by it is the thing the districts sued over. inference
Ohio has no enacted ESA of this kind. The nearest Ohio
instrument is the “Backpack Bill” — H.B. 11 of the 135th General Assembly, a universal education
savings account proposal that was introduced and did not pass, and which is therefore not a
corpus node, because legislation means enacted. Its sponsors
described it as modeled on programs in Arizona, Florida, Nevada, Tennessee, Mississippi, North
Carolina and West Virginia. No source retrieved here names ALEC or this text in connection with
it. verified as an absence in the sources retrieved
The allowable-expense list is the part a funding model would have to absorb — twelve categories ending in “any other valid educational expenses approved by the Department”, which is an open-ended commitment no per-pupil figure can size. inference
Properties
| Publisher | American Legislative Exchange Council, Education and Workforce Development Task Force. An advocacy publisher; see the voucher act node for the same note in full. verified |
|---|---|
| Version | Final model policy adopted July 20, 2017; amended September 9, 2017. verified |
| Eligibility | "Any student who is a legal resident of [state]" and otherwise eligible for public enrollment. The model's own commentary offers narrower alternatives — students with disabilities, income-qualified families, military dependents, foster youth, siblings of prior recipients — so universality is the default rather than the only drafting on offer. verified ALEC model text |
| How the award is set | "The dollar amount the resident school district would have received to serve and educate the eligible student from state and local sources." The model provides 100% of that amount; its commentary notes Nevada's enacted variant paying 100% for special-needs and free-and-reduced-lunch students and 90% for everyone else. verified ALEC model text Note what the denominator includes: state and local. Ohio's charge-off arithmetic treats the local share as a district obligation measured against its own valuation, not as an amount that travels with a student, so importing this award basis into Ohio would require deciding something Ohio's formula currently does not express. inference |
| Effect on district funding | A deduction that leaves the student in the count. The award is "subtracted from the state school aid payable to the student's resident school district", while the participating student "shall be counted in the enrollment figures for his or her resident school district". verified ALEC model text Whether the second clause is intended to protect the district's other enrollment-driven funding or to keep the state's own aggregate stable is not stated in the text. open |
| Regulation of private schools | Annual testing — state assessments or "nationally norm-referenced tests that measure learning gains in math and language arts" — with results reported annually disaggregated by grade, gender, family income and race, public reporting from year three, and a required annual parental satisfaction survey. Administration sits with "the Department of Public Instruction or an organization chosen by the state", which may contract private financial firms to run the accounts. verified ALEC model text Lighter on the provider than the voucher model, because an ESA's regulated party is the account rather than the school. |
| Evidence of adoption | Nothing, and here the absence is sharper than on the voucher node, because the Ohio proposal this text most resembles was searched for directly. Reporting on H.B. 11 of the 135th General Assembly describes it as based on other states' enacted programs and does not name ALEC or this model. That is an absence in the sources retrieved, not a demonstration that no connection exists. open |
Links
| Instance of | Model Policy |
|---|---|
| Succeeds | Parental Choice Scholarship Program Act (Universal Eligibility) |
| Departs from | EdChoice Expansion Scholarship |
| Bears on | Enrolled ADM |
| Contested under | Thorough and Efficient |
| Sourced from | ALEC — Education Savings Account Act |
| Sourced from | ALEC — Index of State Education Freedom (2025, 2nd edition) |