ALEC — Parental Choice Scholarship Program Act (Universal Eligibility)

Source. American Legislative Exchange Council, model policy The Parental Choice Scholarship Program Act (Universal Eligibility). Finalized January 1, 2005; amended January 16, 2016. ALEC publishes three variants of this act — universal eligibility, means-tested eligibility, and universal eligibility with a means-tested scholarship amount; this record covers the first. Type. Secondary source — model legislation. Not enacted law in any state, including Ohio. Location. alec.org/model-policy/the-parental-choice-scholarship-program-act-universal-eligibility/.

What it contains. A template voucher statute with bracketed placeholders for the adopting state. The provisions this corpus draws on:

Provision	What the model text specifies
Eligible student	“Any elementary or secondary student who was eligible to attend a public school in [state] in the preceding semester or is starting school in [state] for the first time”
Scholarship amount	The lesser of the participating school’s annual cost per pupil “including both operational and capital facility costs”, or “the dollar amount the resident school district would have received to serve and educate the eligible student from state and local sources had the student enrolled there”
Tuition above the award	Permitted — participating schools may charge beyond the scholarship
Resident district	“The funds needed for a scholarship shall be subtracted from the state school aid payable to the student’s resident school district. 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”
Oversubscription	Random selection, with preference permitted for siblings and previously enrolled scholarship students
Testing	State achievement tests or nationally recognized norm-referenced tests in math and language arts; results to parents and the state; public reporting from year three
Financial assurance	Schools receiving $50,000 or more must post a surety bond or demonstrate financial viability
Regulatory limit	“The Department or any other state agency may not in any way regulate the educational program” of a participating school

The act also carries a rationale section arguing that a broad array of choices — public, charter, private secular, private religious — is what led the U.S. Supreme Court and state courts to uphold choice programs, the purpose being secular and the parent’s options many.

Why a model bill is cataloged at all. Two of its provisions are directly comparable against things this corpus has already established, which makes it more than a statement of a position. The award is set from state and local per-pupil support and is subtracted from state school aid payable to the resident district, with the state keeping any remainder. Ohio’s original EdChoice design deducted from the resident district’s foundation payment; the arrangement under the Fair School Funding Plan does not, which this corpus confirmed negatively and exhaustively against the FY2027 calculator. So the model can be checked against Ohio rather than merely quoted beside it.

It comes with a point of view. ALEC is a membership organization of state legislators that advances “limited government, free markets, and federalism” and publishes model bills for adoption by its members; its model policies are advocacy instruments, and the eligibility and funding provisions above should be read knowing that.

Access constraints. Freely available. Retrieved as a web page rather than a pinned document, so nothing here is in source-digests.txt and no connector fetches it — the same footing as Fordham Institute — Ohio Base Cost Model Commentary. A published model policy is dated and versioned by its publisher, which is weaker than a hash but is what the publisher offers.

Caveat — the one that matters most. A resemblance between this text and an Ohio enactment is a resemblance between two published documents and nothing more. This record does not establish, and this repository holds no evidence for, any claim that an Ohio bill was drawn from it. Sponsor testimony, committee records, or drafting history against the enacted section would be needed. See the adoption_evidence field on the corpus node, which is [open].