Parental Choice Scholarship Program Act (Universal Eligibility)

Its funding mechanism is a specific, checkable claim, and Ohio’s answer to the same question is established. The model directs that “the funds needed for a scholarship shall be subtracted from the state school aid payable to the student’s resident school district”, and that “any aid the school district would have received for the student in excess of the funds needed for a scholarship will be kept by the state”. verified ALEC model text

Set that against Ohio. Under the original EdChoice design a scholarship was funded by deducting from the resident district’s foundation payment, which is the model’s shape. verified Under the Fair School Funding Plan it is not a deduction — confirmed negatively and exhaustively against the FY2027 calculator, where the payment report’s transfer channel is two named lines and neither carries a scholarship, pinned in crates/project/tests/the_voucher_channel_is_absent.rs. verified

So the relationship between this text and Ohio’s enacted arrangement runs in two directions at once, and that is the substance worth recording: Ohio’s eligibility design converged on the model — H.B. 33 made every student eligible in 2023 — while Ohio’s funding mechanism diverged from it in the opposite direction over the same years. A reader who assumed a state with universal eligibility had also adopted the model’s deduct would be wrong about Ohio, and wrong in the way that matters most to a district’s balance sheet. inference

Two provisions of the model look like nothing Ohio does, and both have Ohio answers. The state keeping the excess was Ohio law for two fiscal years and was abolished by name; the state and local award basis appears once in Ohio’s code, aimed the other way. verified See the findings — the answer to the first is a choice Ohio made twice, differently, in one document.

Nothing here says Ohio adopted this text. See adoption_evidence.

What this repository computed # ↑ Contents

Not what Ohio publishes. Figures derived here from committed fixtures, each one citing the test that reproduces it.

The state keeping the excess was Ohio law, and the same budget refused it next door # ↑ Contents

H.B. 1 of the 128th General Assembly set the traditional EdChoice deduct at $5,200 for every scholarship — up from $2,700 for a kindergartener, because the same budget began counting kindergarteners as full-time students — and in the next sentence cut the maximum award to $4,200 for grades K-8 and $5,000 for grades 9-12. A district therefore lost at least $1,000 more than the scholarship could pay for a younger student and at least $200 more for an older one, and the state kept the difference. That is the model’s provision, enacted, for FY2010 and FY2011. verified crates/project

The residual was created rather than inherited. Under prior law the maxima were indexed to the base cost and had reached about $4,500 and $5,300 by FY2009, so a high-school scholarship had been worth more than the deduct that paid for it. One instrument raised the deduct and cut both awards below it. H.B. 153 abolished the arrangement two years later by reducing the deduct “from $5,200 to the actual amount of the scholarship” — once the two quantities are one number there is no excess to keep. verified

And the same greenbook disposes of the same residual the other way, two pages earlier. The Cleveland program’s deduct was a fixed earmark, and “any funds that are not needed to cover the costs of the program are disbursed to CMSD”. verified So Ohio’s answer to this provision is not a rule but a choice it made twice, in opposite directions, for two scholarship programs running in the same year. A model text can be matched against a state only one program at a time. inference

The award basis exists in Ohio and points inward # ↑ Contents

The model sets the award from “state and local sources”. That phrase computes a per-pupil amount exactly once in the committed statute extract: R.C. 3302.12, where a district that has replaced a failing building’s principal and teaching staff must fund that building at “the per pupil amount of state and local revenues received by the district” multiplied by its enrollment. verified crates/project

It is the model’s arithmetic aimed the other way — money moving from a district to a school the district still operates, on an accountability trigger, rather than out of the district with a departing student. Every Ohio scholarship award is a flat statutory dollar figure or a function of family income, and none carries a local term at all, which is why the charge-off never enters the calculation. verified

The variant that has not been read # ↑ Contents

One variant of this act is a closer match to Ohio than the text on this node. ALEC publishes three — universal eligibility (this one), means-tested eligibility, and universal eligibility with a means-tested scholarship amount — and the third’s title describes H.B. 33’s expansion exactly: every student eligible, the award scaled by family income. Its text has not been retrieved, so whether its provisions track Ohio’s more closely than this one’s do is unestablished, and it is the first thing to read if this line of work continues. open