Jon Peterson Special Needs Scholarship

It is capped, and it is the only scholarship program here that is. Participation may not exceed five per cent of the students statewide identified as children with disabilities in the previous fiscal year. verified R.C. 3310.52(B) Nothing comparable bounds EdChoice, the expansion, Cleveland or Autism, which makes this the one program whose size is a policy decision rather than a demand outcome.

It reaches almost every district in the state. Students enrolled in 2024-2025 came from 494 school districts — over 80% of Ohio’s. verified 2025 Scholarship Annual Report That is the widest footprint of any program in this channel, and it is why a per-district figure matters more here than anywhere else: a program touching four fifths of districts at 8,680 students is thin almost everywhere, and a district-level effect is invisible in the statewide total.

And the per-district breakdown is exactly what this project has not found. The annual report says a breakdown of students per district “is available here” and links to a route on the department’s reports portal — which answers every path with the same application shell, and serves its reports as Power BI embeds behind an entitlement anonymous users do not hold. See deduction, which records the two routes and what would reach them. The program’s own publisher points at the file, and nothing this project can fetch carries it. verified open

What this repository computed # ↑ Contents

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

Its first year is in the archive, and applications ran a fifth above payments # ↑ Contents

The department’s archive reaches this program for FY2013 alone — the year it began — and is the only held source that splits it. 2,129 applications; 1,779 scholarships with at least one payment made against them. verified crates/project

So 350 families applied in the program’s first year and were never paid, a sixth of everyone who asked. The archive does not say why, and none of its four income-status definitions applies to this program. open Recorded because the annual report’s participation figure is the payment count alone, and a reader taking it for demand understates the first year by a fifth.

It has three published years, and the department posted two of them in one afternoon # ↑ Contents

This program had an annual report of its own until the 2025 consolidated report absorbed it, and two editions were still being served when they were fetched. With the consolidated report’s Jon Peterson section that is FY2023, FY2024 and FY2025 — the only participation series any scholarship program has between FY2013 and FY2025, and the first year-on-year change in this program’s participation the department has published anywhere. verified crates/project

fiscal year   students   providers   districts   expenditure
FY2023          8,186        439        487      $81,773,133.70
FY2024          8,551        500        495      $95,362,957.53
FY2025          8,680        530        494     $103,944,388.15

Participation rose 4.46% and then 1.51%, so the growth is decelerating. Providers grew faster than students in both years, so the average provider served fewer children each year. And districts of residence rose once and then fell by one while participation kept rising: the reach saturated at the four fifths of Ohio’s districts the reports claim in prose, and the growth after FY2024 is more children from districts already reached. verified That last line is what the description’s “widest footprint of any program in this channel” now rests on — a footprint that has stopped widening.

The expenditure column is the department’s own arithmetic, quoted once. Only the FY2023 edition writes a total in words, and it equals the sum of the six disability-category figures printed beneath it to the cent. That is what licenses summing the same chart in the two editions that state nothing — including the $103,944,388.15 the consolidated report implies and never writes. verified

The publication history is a lapse and a catch-up, not a rolling replacement. Three older editions were served from the department’s Annual Reports page as late as June 2023 and were gone by June 2024; the FY23 and FY24 editions were both exported from Word on one afternoon in March 2025, nine months after FY2024 closed, and the page carried no JPSN report at all in between. verified JPSN Annual Report — one program reporting on itself, for two years The three older editions — FY2016, FY2017 and FY2020 — exist only in the archive and are not extracted. open

The FY2023 edition’s award table is FY2024’s, and one sentence in it stays open # ↑ Contents

The one expenditure total stated in words is dated to another year. It says “Total expenditures for the JPSN program during the 2021-2022 school year sum to $81,773,133.70” in a report headed FY 2023 throughout, grafted onto the end of a paragraph whose first sentence is “Prior to the 2021-2022 school year…” — which is where a copy error would come from. The FY24 edition deletes the sentence and keeps the paragraph and the chart, a deletion rather than a correction. verified open

The award table the FY23 edition prints is H.B. 33’s FY2024 schedule. The FY23 and FY24 editions print the same six maxima to the dollar, $8,941 to $30,000. Two LSC analyses, H.B. 110’s and H.B. 33’s, state the FY2023 schedule, and it runs $7,976 to $27,000. The FY24 edition and the consolidated report print their own years’ enacted schedules exactly. verified crates/project

This node used to read each table as a uniform fraction of the statutory vector, recomputed by index each year, so that two editions printing one table meant an index that stood still. The fractions are real, but they are ratios of enacted schedules. FY2025’s 0.9542 is $32,445 over $34,000, because H.B. 96 raised every position alike. Nothing stood still: H.B. 33 raised categories one to five 12.1% between FY2023 and FY2024. verified crates/project

That removes the tension the two readings turned on. Between the editions, spending per student rose 11.6% and the schedule 12.1%; between FY2024 and FY2025, 7.4% and 7.2%. The spend tracks the schedule in both years, which is what a FY2023 chart under a FY2023 heading would show. inference Only the expenditure sentence’s “2021-2022” still dates the chart to another year, and nothing in the documents settles it. This corpus carries every column as published. open

The two publishers agree on this program’s money and not on its counts # ↑ Contents

FY2024 is the only fiscal year both the department and the Legislative Service Commission describe, so it is the only place either can be checked against the other. verified

FY2024        department                      LSC
expenditure   $95,362,957.53                  about $95.4 million
students      8,551                           about 7,800
providers     500                             454

The dollars round to each other, which is the strongest independent evidence in the lineage that a given edition’s spending chart belongs to the fiscal year on its cover. The counts do not: the department’s participation figure sits 9.6% above LSC’s, and its provider count is 46 more than a figure LSC gives unhedged — LSC’s 454 falling between the department’s own FY2023 and FY2024 counts, so a reader holding both documents could take it for either year. verified Nothing says the two count the same population: the department counts providers approved to participate and LSC’s sentence counts providers children received services from. inference The disagreement is pinned rather than resolved, and it is why Bound::spliceable does not treat a count like LSC’s as joinable to this series.

The applications series that would fill the gap is printed and unreadable # ↑ Contents

Every edition, the consolidated report included, opens Program Participation with a bar chart of total applications by fiscal year — ten bars in FY23, eleven in FY24, and twelve in the consolidated report, FY2014 through FY2025, which is the whole of the channel’s participation gap and both its edges. Applications counted separately from scholarships paid is the second denominator the archive maintains and the shape of evidence this channel’s unexplained averages need. None of the bars carries a data label: pdftotext reaches the axis gridlines, the years and the legend, and nothing else. The values are in committed bytes and would need the charts’ geometry read rather than their text. open JPSN Annual Report — one program reporting on itself, for two years