Autism Scholarship
The oldest of Ohio’s special-needs scholarships, established in 2003 for children aged three through twenty-one diagnosed as on the autism spectrum, letting a parent buy a special education program from an approved provider rather than take one from the resident district. verified R.C. 3310.41; 2025 Scholarship Annual Report
program/autism-scholarship · 1 node point here · 2 corrections
It is the outlier of this channel on every axis except size. At 6,016 students in 2024-2025
it is the smallest of the five programs, and at an average award of $26,598.88 it pays roughly
four times what any other pays and more than five times the EdChoice expansion. verified 2025
Scholarship Annual Report That year its ceiling was $32,445, and the average award is 82.0% of
it, against EdChoice’s $5,500 and $7,500. verified 2025 Scholarship Annual Report; R.C.
3317.022(A)(10); the ceiling and the share
(crates/project)
H.B. 96 raised the ceiling to $34,000 for FY2026 and FY2027, and that is the figure the section
now carries.
That ratio is the program’s whole character: it buys a special education placement, not tuition at a chartered nonpublic school, and the two are not the same purchase. Reading this program’s per-pupil figure against the other four — or against any per-pupil figure on the formula side — compares a placement to a tuition. inference
It is also the one program whose published average reconciles. The report’s stated average
award of $26,598.88 is exactly its expenditure divided by its participation. For Traditional
EdChoice, the expansion and Cleveland the two do not agree — see amount on
Traditional EdChoice Scholarship, where the discrepancy is recorded. That this
one is exact and the others are not suggests the difference is a denominator rather than an
error, and nothing in the report says which. inference open
What this repository computed Contents
Not what Ohio publishes. Figures derived here from committed fixtures, each one citing the test that reproduces it.
A ten-year series, and a greenbook figure it refutes Contents
The department’s archive carries this program from FY2004, its first full year, at 70
students, to FY2013 at 2,622 — a thirty-sevenfold rise in a decade, which is the steepest growth
of any program in the archive. verified crates/project
The sheet publishes payments only: its note says the system that wrote it “did not distinguish
between new and renewal applicants” for this program, so the applications-against-payments
distinction the other sheets carry is absent here. verified
It also settles a figure LSC published. The greenbook for H.B. 59 of the 130th states that
“In FY 2012, 360 students received scholarships” under this program. The department’s archive
says 2,413, and the next greenbook says 2,623 for FY2014 — continuous with the department’s
series and not with its own predecessor. So LSC’s FY2012 figure is wrong by a factor of seven,
identified from two directions. verified crates/project
Recorded rather than corrected: both publishers’ numbers are held as written, and what is
asserted is that they cannot both be read.
Properties Contents
| Name | Autism Scholarship Program |
|---|---|
| Mechanism | funding-unit |
| Why this mechanism | Direct payment as its own funding unit. Not a deduction. verified R.C. 3317.022 names the autism scholarship unit as one of six funding units the department computes and distributes state core foundation funding to. R.C. 3310.41(B) establishes the program and has the department "pay a scholarship under section 3317.022 of the Revised Code to an eligible applicant". verified The word "deduct" appears nowhere in R.C. 3310.41 as it now stands. verified Before FY2022 it was a deduction, and this is how it ran. The scholarship student stayed in the resident district's ADM for the purposes of the state funding formula; the award — the lesser of the total fees charged by the alternative provider and the statutory ceiling — was then deducted from that district's state aid and paid to the provider. verified crates/project LSC states it in those words in the greenbook for every enacted budget from H.B. 1 of the 128th to H.B. 166 of the 133rd, covering FY2010 through FY2021, and in none after. H.B. 110 ended it: "funding for all scholarship programs is paid directly, instead of counting most scholarship students in their resident districts and deducting the scholarship amount from the districts' aid". verified the H.B. 110 greenbookWhat is still open is not the rule but the arithmetic it produced — which district lost how much in which year. That is the per-district amount, and dew-payment-reports remains the source for it. open |
| Eligibility | A child aged three through twenty-one diagnosed as on the autism spectrum, holding either an individualized education program from the resident district or a private diagnosis from a physician or licensed psychologist. verified 2025 Scholarship Annual Report The provider must be an alternative public provider or a registered private provider — a nonpublic school or other nonpublic entity approved by the department to participate — and a "special education program" is a school or facility providing special education and related services to children with disabilities. verified R.C. 3310.41(A) The private-diagnosis route is worth noting beside the Jon Peterson program, which requires an Evaluation Team Report and an IEP. Autism admits a child the district has never evaluated. verified Whether that difference shows up in the two programs' district footprints is not established — the per-district file that would answer it is the one the annual report cites and this project has not reached. open H.B. 96 widened the doors. It set eligibility for both special-needs scholarships at ages three through twenty-one, ending at twenty-two. It admitted a child enrolled in a chartered or nonchartered nonpublic school, or home educated, and for this program one whose IEP includes services related to autism. It allowed a child to contract with several providers at once, and it allowed services to be delivered virtually. verified R.C. 3310.41 as held; the H.B. 96 greenbook LSC names only Jon Peterson's three- and four-year-olds and nineteen- to twenty-one-year-olds as ineligible under prior law, so the age alignment widened that program rather than this one. inference the H.B. 96 greenbook It also requires the department to "maintain a list of each registered private provider and the location of that provider on its publicly accessible web site". verified R.C. 3310.41(O) What the department serves under that duty is recorded at Ohio Scholarship Providers Interactive Directory — the list the statute requires, unread: a Power BI report this project cannot read anonymously. Whether it is keyed on IRN is not established. open |
| Amount | |
| FY2025: 6,016 students, $160,018,883.30, average award $26,598.88. verified 2025 Scholarship Annual Report LSC's H.B. 96 analysis estimated FY2025 at 5,031 students and $150.7 million, and projects 5,333 students and $169.1 million for FY2026 and 5,653 and $181.0 million for FY2027. verified the H.B. 96 greenbook, Table 3 The estimate for the year the department reports sits nearly a thousand students below the department's count. Neither publisher says whether the two count the same population. open The award is the lesser of the tuition charged for the student's special education program and a ceiling. In FY2025 that ceiling was $32,445, which makes the average award 82.0% of it. verified crates/project The statute as held reads $34,000, and that is H.B. 96's figure for FY2026 and FY2027 — the section in revised-code.txt is the text that act left, effective 30 September 2025. verified R.C. 3317.022(A)(12)Unlike the pilot project program's $5,500 and $7,500, this ceiling carries no indexing clause, so it does not rise with the statewide average base cost per pupil. Every move it has made was an amendment in a budget act. verified crates/project fiscal years ceiling set by
FY2016-FY2021 $27,000 H.B. 64, from $20,000
FY2022 $31,500 H.B. 110
FY2023-FY2025 $32,445 H.B. 110
FY2026-FY2027 $34,000 H.B. 96Each figure is a sentence in LSC's analysis of the act that set it. In that table H.B. 96 added $1,555, and LSC gives the reason as "providing parity with the JPSN capped amount". The two ceilings were already level: H.B. 33 had raised Jon Peterson's to $32,445 for FY2025, so H.B. 96 moved both together. verified crates/project | |
| Appropriation line | No line of its own — paid from the foundation aid appropriation, from the same five line items that support foundation aid for all public school students: GRF ALI 200550 Foundation Funding, GRF ALI 200502 Pupil Transportation, Fund 5VS0 ALI 200604, Fund 5YO0 ALI 200491, and Lottery Fund 7017 ALI 200612. verified LSC redbook and greenbook, crates/project/fixtures/dew-redbook.txt and dew-greenbook.txt. Checked against the act as enacted, not only as introduced: the five lines and the sentence naming them are identical in both. The amounts in that table are not — foundation aid was enacted $82m above the proposal — so nothing here quotes one. |
Where this appears on the site Contents
The pages outside the corpus that link here, and the section of each the link sits in.
| Method | In “What is not here”. |
|---|---|
| Statewide | In “The six funding units”. |
Links Contents
| Instance of | Funding Program |
|---|---|
| Funded under | Fair School Funding Plan |
| Coexists with | Jon Peterson Special Needs Scholarship |
| Parallels | FSFP Special Education Weights |
| Sourced from | Scholarship Annual Report — the department's own account of the channel |
| Sourced from | Ohio Revised Code — the sections this corpus cites |
| Revised by | Am. Sub. H.B. 110 (2021) — FY2022-23 Budget; Fair School Funding Plan |
| Revised by | Am. Sub. H.B. 96 (2025) — FY2026-27 Budget |
| Sourced from | LSC Budget Analysis — H.B. 96 (FY2026-27) |
| Sourced from | Historical Scholarship Data — the deduct era, counted two ways |
Also mentions
Pointed at by
| Jon Peterson Special Needs Scholarship | Coexists with |
|---|
What this node used to say Contents
The corpus is not rewritten to have always been right. Each entry is a claim this node carried, what replaced it, and the thing that settled it.
Correction 1 of 2
It said
The description set the FY2025 average award beside a “statutory ceiling” of $34,000, and
amount left open whether that ceiling had been raised by amendment rather than by index.
It says
$34,000 is the ceiling H.B. 96 wrote for FY2026 and FY2027. In FY2025 the ceiling was $32,445, set by H.B. 110. Every move the ceiling has made since $20,000 was an amendment in a budget act, and none was an index.
Settled by
#779. The vendored R.C. 3317.022 is the text H.B. 96 left, effective 30 September 2025, and LSC’s analysis of that act states the FY2025 figure in the sentence that raises it.
What else it touched
The average award sits at 82.0% of the ceiling in force, not 78%. No other figure in this
node leaned on the $34,000. program/jon-peterson-special-needs carried the same vintage
error in its award table and is corrected alongside.
Correction 2 of 2
It said
eligibility called the per-district file that would compare the two programs’ district
footprints “the withdrawn one”.
It says
Unreached, not withdrawn. The reports portal’s 404 is the same application shell every path returns, and the report behind the route is an embed behind an entitlement the anonymous token does not carry.
Settled by
What else it touched
One adjective; the open question it qualifies is unchanged.
Why this node is here Contents
A note from the corpus about itself rather than about Ohio, kept because provenance includes why something was written down.
deduction calculator as one of the four programs it must compute over, and missing from the corpus for as long as that stub has existed. inference