Cleveland Scholarship and Tutoring Program
Ohio’s first voucher program, created in the mid-1990s for students in the Cleveland City School District — a single-district program rather than a statewide one, established in the context of the district’s academic distress and state takeover. verified
program/cleveland-scholarship · 4 nodes point here · 1 correction
Its significance is national. In Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (2002) the United States Supreme Court upheld the program against a federal Establishment Clause challenge, holding that a program of true private choice does not establish religion merely because most participating families choose religious schools. verified That decision cleared the constitutional path for voucher expansion across the country.
It did not clear the Ohio constitutional path. Zelman answered a federal question; whether Article VI, Section 2’s bar on sectarian control of school funds permits the arrangement is a separate question raised in the 2025 EdChoice challenge. inference
It is not charged against Cleveland’s funding. Under the Fair School Funding Plan the program is the pilot project scholarship unit, one of six funding units R.C. 3317.022 pays directly rather than a deduction from the district’s foundation payment. verified
What this repository computed Contents
Not what Ohio publishes. Figures derived here from committed fixtures, each one citing the test that reproduces it.
The department’s archive gives this program seventeen years, and one of its columns Contents
changes meaning in the middle Contents
The 2025 annual report was the only participation figure the corpus held for this program.
The department’s Historical Scholarship Data workbook carries it from FY1997, the
program’s first year, and counts it two ways in every one of them: applications made, and
scholarships with at least one payment against them. verified crates/project
The two are far apart. FY1997 records 3.1 applications for every scholarship actually paid, and even FY2013 records 1.1. verified crates/project So a participation figure taken off the wrong column overstates the early program threefold, and the report’s own unexplained average — recorded on Traditional EdChoice Scholarship — is a denominator question of exactly this kind.
The renewal column is not a count of applications before FY2010. Renewal applications equal the prior year’s paid scholarships exactly, for 12 consecutive years, FY1998 through FY2009. verified crates/project An identity holding twelve times running is an administrative roll-forward — everyone paid last year carried forward whether or not a family did anything — and not a fact about who applied.
It breaks at FY2010, the same year the low-income renewal column starts carrying values at all.
From FY2010 renewals are counted independently and land 10% to 14% below the prior year’s
payments. verified crates/project That is attrition the earlier convention made
arithmetically invisible, and it means a renewal rate computed across the whole series is
computed across two different definitions. That is not an open question but a consequence of
the two verified findings above it, and both halves of it are held. verified crates/project
And the program’s existence is what keeps Cleveland off the EdChoice designated list Contents
R.C. 3310.03 makes a student ineligible for traditional EdChoice whose “resident district is
not a school district in which the pilot project scholarship program is operating”, and directs
that the building ranking behind the designated list “shall not include buildings operated by”
such a district. verified R.C. 3310.03 The department’s designated list for 2026-2027
covers 606 districts, and the one it does not cover is Cleveland Municipal. verified crates/dispersion
R.C. 3310.032 carries the same exclusion, so a Cleveland resident is outside both EdChoice
programs rather than only the building-based one. verified
Properties Contents
| Name | Cleveland Scholarship and Tutoring Program |
|---|---|
| Mechanism | funding-unit |
| Why this mechanism | Direct payment as the pilot project scholarship unit. Not a deduction. verified R.C. 3317.022, R.C. 3313.975 The statute never names Cleveland. R.C. 3313.975(A) has the director implement the program in "any school districts that are or have ever been under federal court order requiring supervision and operation" — a definition by history rather than by name, which is why the program survives as a single-district one without saying so. verified The deduct-era mechanism was not the other programs' deduct. Autism and Jon Peterson kept the scholarship student in the resident district's ADM and took the award out of that district's aid, so what was deducted followed a pupil. This program inverted both halves: "Scholarship students are not counted in Cleveland's ADM for funding purposes", stated in every greenbook from H.B. 119 of the 127th to H.B. 166 of the 133rd, so there was no pupil in the formula for a deduction to follow. What was deducted was a fixed earmark of the district's own aid — $23.5 million a year by FY2020, $1.0 million of it set aside for tutoring — carried forward from budget to budget at its previous level. verified crates/projectAnd the deduction was only ever part of it: LSC writes that the program is "partially supported through a deduction". The FY2008-09 analysis itemizes the two channels separately — a GRF appropriation for the program, beside a deduction that in that biennium came out of the district's poverty-based assistance rather than out of foundation funding generally. The aid the deduction was taken from moved over the program's life; the two-channel shape did not. verified the greenbooks for H.B. 119 of the 127th and H.B. 166 of the 133rd What is still open is the year-by-year size of the deduction before FY2020, which dew-payment-reports would give. open |
| Eligibility | Students residing in the Cleveland Metropolitan School District — reached in statute through the federal-court-supervision definition in R.C. 3313.975(A) rather than by name — subject to income-based priority in awarding. Created in 1995 as a pilot initiative; authorized under R.C. 3313.974 through 3313.979. verified R.C. 3313.975; 2025 Scholarship Annual Report |
| Amount | FY2025: 8,345 students, $55,155,295.70, average award as published $6,836.35. verified 2025 Scholarship Annual Report Expenditure over participation is $6,609.38; the same unexplained gap the other programs show, recorded on Traditional EdChoice Scholarship. open Statutory bound: the lesser of the alternative school's net tuition charges, or $5,500 for grades K-8 and $7,500 for 9-12, with those amounts rising by the same percentage as the statewide average base cost per pupil. verified R.C. 3317.022(A)(11) The department reports FY2025 maxima of $6,166 and $8,408, which are the indexed values. verified |
| Appropriation line | No line of its own — it is paid from the foundation aid appropriation. Five line items "are used to collectively support state foundation aid payments for all public school students in the state and scholarship payments for students enrolled in state scholarship programs": 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.The five are LSC's grouping, and this repository cannot reproduce their total by adding them. LSC's own Total foundation aid is $11,230,057,557 for FY2026 as enacted; summing the five line items out of the committed series gives $11,547,417,388, because the table counts only the foundation-aid earmark of GRF ALI 200502 and not the whole line. verified project::budget_analysis, which reads the table rather than summing it So there are two numbers here on purpose — LSC's, wherever LSC prints a table, and a line sum for the twenty-nine years no table covers — and neither is an approximation of the other. See “What foundation funding means”.That is a finding rather than a citation. The scholarship channel does not appear as a separate appropriation, so the budget document a reader would consult to size it shows it merged with the formula it diverts from — which is part of why this channel is as hard to see as the corpus keeps recording it to be. |
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
Also mentions
Pointed at by
| Department of Education and Workforce | Administers |
|---|---|
| Ohio Department of Education (superseded) | Administers |
| Cleveland Municipal School District | Subject to |
| Traditional EdChoice Scholarship | Follows |
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 1
It said
The node carried mechanism: deduction flatly, from its seeding.
It says
It is not charged against Cleveland’s funding. Under the Fair School Funding Plan the program is the pilot project scholarship unit, one of six funding units R.C. 3317.022 pays directly.
Settled by
R.C. 3317.022, read against the FY2027 calculator’s funding units.
What else it touched
The old value was a reasonable reading of the program’s deduct-era history and wrong
about the law in force. Which era a scholarship’s mechanism is described from decides
whether the resident district loses the money, so the two must be dated rather than
merged. The deduct-era mechanism is now recorded on mechanism, and it turns out not to
have been the per-pupil deduction the old value implied.
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.