ALEC — Education Savings Account Act

Source. American Legislative Exchange Council, model policy The Education Savings Account Act, Education and Workforce Development Task Force. Final model policy adopted July 20, 2017; amended September 9, 2017. Type. Secondary source — model legislation. Not enacted law in any state, including Ohio. Location. alec.org/model-policy/the-education-savings-account-act-2/.

What it contains. A template education savings account statute — the successor design to the voucher model, routing the money to a spendable account rather than to a school. The provisions this corpus draws on:

Provision	What the model text specifies
Eligible student	“Any student who is a legal resident of [state]” otherwise eligible for public enrollment. The model notes the definition may instead be narrowed to students with disabilities, income-qualified families, military dependents, foster youth, or siblings of prior recipients
Account amount	“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%; its own commentary notes Nevada’s variant paying 100% for special-needs and free-and-reduced-lunch students and 90% for others
Allowable expenses	Private school tuition and fees; textbooks, uniforms, curriculum; private tutoring; online learning; college entrance and AP exams; up to $2,000 a year into a 529 plan; special education services; postsecondary tuition; career-technical education; services contracted from a public school; transportation up to $1,000 a year; and “any other valid educational expenses approved by the Department”
Resident district	“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”
Administration	“The Department of Public Instruction or an organization chosen by the state”, with discretion to contract private financial firms for account management
Testing	State assessments or “nationally norm-referenced tests that measure learning gains in math and language arts”; results reported annually disaggregated by grade, gender, family income and race; public reporting from year three
Survey	An annual parental satisfaction survey is required

Why a model bill is cataloged at all. The same reason as the voucher act, plus one provision that has no Ohio counterpart and is worth having on the record: the model deducts the award from the resident district and keeps the student in that district’s enrollment count. A district funded on a count that includes students it is not educating, while the money for them is subtracted, is the mechanism Ohio districts describe as the core of their complaint about the original EdChoice design — and it is written into the model explicitly rather than arising as an accident of drafting.

It comes with a point of view; see the note in the voucher act record, which applies unchanged.

Access constraints. Freely available, retrieved as a web page. No digest, no connector — the footing described in the voucher act record.

Caveat. 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. Its sponsors described it as based on programs in Arizona, Florida, Nevada, Tennessee, Mississippi, North Carolina and West Virginia; no source retrieved here names ALEC or this model text, and this record makes no claim that it was drawn from either. H.B. 11 is not a corpus node — the legislation class means enacted — so the comparison this record supports is against Ohio’s enacted scholarship channel, not against the bill that would have most closely resembled it.